what is cultural theory, how does it differ from cultural analysis, and what is the future of this field?
A very short definition
Cultural theory, often expanded into the even bolder denomination of "theoretical humanities", is a field with an amazing traditions and enticing vitality. Essentially, it explores the intricate web of meanings, practices, and power structures that shape human societies. Cultural theorists view culture not as a static collection of practices, but as a living, evolving system of symbols and ideologies that reflect and perpetuate social hierarchies and historical change. The overwhelming multidimensional sphere of cultural theory englobes various post-structuralist methodologies and thematic currents, such as semiotics, deconstruction, gender-oriented studies, and such intellectual inspirations as psychoanalysis. The most brilliant books written in the field of cultural theory, such as - just to give an example - Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977), Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), bell hooks' Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), or Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacres et Simulation (1981) combine daring, innovative conceptualization and terminology with interdisciplinary approach of the cultural objects or mechanisms they study.
This exploration is deeply attuned to the ways in which ideology and power operate, drawing from thinkers like Marx and Foucault to investigate how dominant ideologies control and shape our understanding of the world, while also examining how marginalized voices resist these structures. Through the lens of representation and discourse, scholars like Stuart Hall and Roland Barthes decode how language, images, and media construct identities, influence social categories like race, gender, and class, and create new cultural narratives. A specific current in cultural theory deals with the criticism of hyperreality, i.e. the way how, in consumer society, the media, advertising, and entertainment industries create a hyperreal space where simulations are more real than reality itself (e.g., Disneyland, reality TV, social media).
Cultural theory also delves into the complexities of identity and subjectivity, exploring how our personal and collective selves are shaped by cultural norms, institutions, and histories. It addresses not only the high culture of intellectuals but also the everyday world of material and popular culture, analyzing how mass media, consumerism, and technology influence the ways we experience and understand the world around us. Inspired by postmodern and poststructuralist thought, cultural theory questions the stability of meaning itself, encouraging us to understand reality as something fluid, constructed, and mediated by our cultural frameworks. It also looks at broader questions of globalization and postcolonialism, examining how forces like colonialism, imperialism, and global interconnectedness have shaped our modern cultural landscape and the ways we navigate identity and power across borders.
What is the theory and what is the analysis?
Cultural theory and cultural analysis are closely related yet distinct approaches to understanding culture, each with its own focus, scope, and methods. While both explore how culture shapes and reflects society, cultural theory tends to be more abstract and conceptual, focusing on the broad frameworks, ideologies, and philosophies that explain why and how culture exists in its various forms. It addresses issues like power, identity, meaning, and social structures, drawing from fields like philosophy, sociology, and critical theory. Thinkers like Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, and Antonio Gramsci use cultural theory to analyze the way power dynamics and ideologies are embedded in cultural forms, offering insights into how culture functions within larger societal contexts. On the other hand, cultural analysis is more empirical and practical. It focuses on the detailed examination of specific cultural objects, practices, or phenomena — such as literature, media, art, and social behaviors. The goal is to interpret and understand the meanings embedded in particular cultural artifacts within their context. Cultural analysis involves methods like close reading, semiotics, or discourse analysis to examine how symbols, narratives, and representations convey meaning. It tends to be rooted in concrete examples, exploring how a specific novel, media portrayal, or cultural ritual reflects or challenges social norms and values.
While cultural theory provides the broad conceptual frameworks to understand culture, cultural analysis applies these frameworks to interpret individual cultural phenomena, focusing on specific cases or texts. In essence, cultural theory offers the ideas and tools for analyzing culture, while cultural analysis uses those tools to examine how culture functions in particular contexts.
What are the challanges of the field?
Cultural theory may offen appear as a thing of the past, while the ever-changing flow of humanities moved on toward other inspirations. The biggest limitation of the field, in my view, is the fact that traditional cultural theory and analysis was closely connected to the study of Western, capitalist and consumerist societies, which could appreciate brands rather than things in themselves, and develop symulacra and strategies of symulation anywhere they could. At a given moment, such a type of cultural reality seemed to triumph worldwide, justifying the investment in the analysis of the symulacral world of the late capitalism incontrollably gone global. Yet my scholarly experience focused on the diversities rather than global uniformization and most of my reserach went on rather far from consumerism, capitalistic overabundance, and Mickey Mouse. Also, the general flow of humanities, I am glad to say, moved away from the analysis of Disneylands and shopping malls into the study of cultural idiosyncrasies, local histories, and unexpected depths opening, at a closer look, almost everywhere. Simulacra? Global advent of simulation? It sounds like a joke to me today. Nonetheless, the challange that remains is to renovate the methodological inspirations and put them to good use in the construction of radically pluralistic vision of global cultures. The best of the cultural theory tradition, bold conceptual innovation, its incessant, almost histrionic quest for originality, brilliant phrasing, compelling inclarities and abysmally tempting complexities - those elements form a permanent challenge and ideal for today's scholarly writer. The best cultural theory authors are the old masters of their art - and mine.
Cultural theory, often expanded into the even bolder denomination of "theoretical humanities", is a field with an amazing traditions and enticing vitality. Essentially, it explores the intricate web of meanings, practices, and power structures that shape human societies. Cultural theorists view culture not as a static collection of practices, but as a living, evolving system of symbols and ideologies that reflect and perpetuate social hierarchies and historical change. The overwhelming multidimensional sphere of cultural theory englobes various post-structuralist methodologies and thematic currents, such as semiotics, deconstruction, gender-oriented studies, and such intellectual inspirations as psychoanalysis. The most brilliant books written in the field of cultural theory, such as - just to give an example - Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977), Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), bell hooks' Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), or Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacres et Simulation (1981) combine daring, innovative conceptualization and terminology with interdisciplinary approach of the cultural objects or mechanisms they study.
This exploration is deeply attuned to the ways in which ideology and power operate, drawing from thinkers like Marx and Foucault to investigate how dominant ideologies control and shape our understanding of the world, while also examining how marginalized voices resist these structures. Through the lens of representation and discourse, scholars like Stuart Hall and Roland Barthes decode how language, images, and media construct identities, influence social categories like race, gender, and class, and create new cultural narratives. A specific current in cultural theory deals with the criticism of hyperreality, i.e. the way how, in consumer society, the media, advertising, and entertainment industries create a hyperreal space where simulations are more real than reality itself (e.g., Disneyland, reality TV, social media).
Cultural theory also delves into the complexities of identity and subjectivity, exploring how our personal and collective selves are shaped by cultural norms, institutions, and histories. It addresses not only the high culture of intellectuals but also the everyday world of material and popular culture, analyzing how mass media, consumerism, and technology influence the ways we experience and understand the world around us. Inspired by postmodern and poststructuralist thought, cultural theory questions the stability of meaning itself, encouraging us to understand reality as something fluid, constructed, and mediated by our cultural frameworks. It also looks at broader questions of globalization and postcolonialism, examining how forces like colonialism, imperialism, and global interconnectedness have shaped our modern cultural landscape and the ways we navigate identity and power across borders.
What is the theory and what is the analysis?
Cultural theory and cultural analysis are closely related yet distinct approaches to understanding culture, each with its own focus, scope, and methods. While both explore how culture shapes and reflects society, cultural theory tends to be more abstract and conceptual, focusing on the broad frameworks, ideologies, and philosophies that explain why and how culture exists in its various forms. It addresses issues like power, identity, meaning, and social structures, drawing from fields like philosophy, sociology, and critical theory. Thinkers like Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, and Antonio Gramsci use cultural theory to analyze the way power dynamics and ideologies are embedded in cultural forms, offering insights into how culture functions within larger societal contexts. On the other hand, cultural analysis is more empirical and practical. It focuses on the detailed examination of specific cultural objects, practices, or phenomena — such as literature, media, art, and social behaviors. The goal is to interpret and understand the meanings embedded in particular cultural artifacts within their context. Cultural analysis involves methods like close reading, semiotics, or discourse analysis to examine how symbols, narratives, and representations convey meaning. It tends to be rooted in concrete examples, exploring how a specific novel, media portrayal, or cultural ritual reflects or challenges social norms and values.
While cultural theory provides the broad conceptual frameworks to understand culture, cultural analysis applies these frameworks to interpret individual cultural phenomena, focusing on specific cases or texts. In essence, cultural theory offers the ideas and tools for analyzing culture, while cultural analysis uses those tools to examine how culture functions in particular contexts.
What are the challanges of the field?
Cultural theory may offen appear as a thing of the past, while the ever-changing flow of humanities moved on toward other inspirations. The biggest limitation of the field, in my view, is the fact that traditional cultural theory and analysis was closely connected to the study of Western, capitalist and consumerist societies, which could appreciate brands rather than things in themselves, and develop symulacra and strategies of symulation anywhere they could. At a given moment, such a type of cultural reality seemed to triumph worldwide, justifying the investment in the analysis of the symulacral world of the late capitalism incontrollably gone global. Yet my scholarly experience focused on the diversities rather than global uniformization and most of my reserach went on rather far from consumerism, capitalistic overabundance, and Mickey Mouse. Also, the general flow of humanities, I am glad to say, moved away from the analysis of Disneylands and shopping malls into the study of cultural idiosyncrasies, local histories, and unexpected depths opening, at a closer look, almost everywhere. Simulacra? Global advent of simulation? It sounds like a joke to me today. Nonetheless, the challange that remains is to renovate the methodological inspirations and put them to good use in the construction of radically pluralistic vision of global cultures. The best of the cultural theory tradition, bold conceptual innovation, its incessant, almost histrionic quest for originality, brilliant phrasing, compelling inclarities and abysmally tempting complexities - those elements form a permanent challenge and ideal for today's scholarly writer. The best cultural theory authors are the old masters of their art - and mine.
my essays in cultural analysis
The coming humanities
The quest for transcultural condition
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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.
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ongoing research
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THEORETICAL / EXPERIMENTAL
My main theoretical endeavour focus on the hypothesis of the extracultural becoming of man. It implies a vast array of experiments, such as, among others, the reflection on the conditions of non-cultural poiesis, i.e. radically autonomous creativity, independent from culturally transmitted precedents or inspirations, but on the contrary, solidary with the non-human organic and inorganic world. I am also interested in cultural disruption, caused by great collective and individual catastrophes, as well as voluntary rupture, deliberately seeking liberation from paradigmatic procedures. Both an apocalypse, which I define precisely as a disruption of culturally transmitted procedures of coping with the world, and a deliberate rupture open space for post-cultural creativity, that may, or may not, enter the redesigned frontiers of the cultural. Concomitantly, I study the emergence of the new level of complexity at the intersection of some cultural systems under globalised conditions. Their interference and overlapping may lead to a collapse under the overcharge of contradictory exigences that those interacting cultures impose upon the individual; on the other hand, their outcome may be positive, as they may lead, once again, to the post-cultural as a new range of phenomena characterised by greatness richness and plasticity than those of the cultural. In any case, extracultural creation, as I suppose, may bring about a potential of authenticity, leading to novel, liberating exploration of the uncharted zones of human experience. The research that accompanies this theoretical endeavour develops in several directions. In the first place, I search for a new theoretical idiom suiting what would be a description of vague, abstract, or culturally inarticulate forms of human creativity. This is why I revisit postmodern authors, their experiments at the frontier of verbal, visual, and diagrammatic. I also search for new sources of conceptual inspiration, such as contemporary mathematics and encompass physics. ANALYTICAL My analytical practice and research obviously encompasses both the cultural and the extracultural. Any non-cultural glimpses of human creativity are available for analysis basically through their imperfect cultural translation. I am interested both in verbal and non-verbal modalities of creation, such as the art of Min Tanaka, a Japanese dancer and performer. Traces of extracultural insight are partially present in the cultural transmission as underground currents, surfacing from time to time as texts, images, artworks, documented practices. Thus, my everyday work consists in exploring the marginal zones of cultures where some insight into the non-cultural may occasionally be found. Such a collected insight is to nourish the theoretical reflection on the symbolical matrix encompassing both the culturally actualized and the unexploited or potential areas of meaning. I have also been active in much more traditional genres of literary criticism. As a researcher in comparative literature, I am currently focusing on transcultural writing and the creation of a non-hegemonically universal system of literary communication. I understand World Literature as a creation of the writers appealing to the non-local readership, dissolving the frontiers of literatures defined territorially (ex. as national or regional literatures) rather than diagrammatically (as charts of connections). Those writers usually transgress the frontiers of languages (ex. through translingual strategies or incrustation of native tongues into the matrix of the dominating languages in transindigenous writing). In strictly academic terms, Portuguese and Lusophone studies used to be at the core of my specialization in Romance literatures. I also dedicate a great deal of attention to the Mediterranean as an area of circulation and interference between Western and Eastern literary, dogmatic and aesthetic systems. In this area of research, I conjugate literary criticism with the history of ideas and comparative religious studies, giving special relevance to mysticism and non-orthodox religious thought. I have been working on the formation of a trans-religious postsecularism combining the spiritual inspirations liberated by the dissolution of confessional denominations. The outcomes of my dispersed research and criticism in World Literature are brought together by the idea of travel as a framing circumstance of reading, leading to a textual/visual conceptualization of meaningful landscapes. They are to be found on this website in the section "Travels & Literature" that I constantly enrich and develop. VISUAL I also engage in visual experimentation, exploring the connection between text and image, especially when it comes to the idea of insufficiency of language and the necessity of searching for more encompassing systems of communication (between such possibilities as the mystical search for the pre-lapsarian language of angels and contemporary mathematics as a way of dealing with contents and ideas that go beyond the culturally determined human experience). By which I understand using visual tools to create and convey my novel theoretical approach. I am also interested in the relations between the discourses of cultural theory and the visual arts. |
toward transcultural humanities |
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Transcultural Studies are based on transregional and transdisciplinary outlook, treating cultures not as closed, well-defined, separate entities, but as the result of multiple transformations, contaminations and entanglements. Being so, the study of cultures require a combination of methodological and theoretical approaches blurring the frontiers of traditional disciplines. This is why, contributing to this relatively novel area, I combine my primary outlook, derived from global literary studies and comparative literature, with other theoretical and methodological sources and legacies, such as the history of ideas, comparative religious studies, the legacy of postmodern philosophy and cultural analysis. I study contemporary transcultural fluxes, as well as the historical background of such phenomena. I believe it is very important to rise the awareness that the transcultural reality is not exclusively the matter of the present-day, globalised world, and it does not mark or imply a rupture with the past. Quite to the contrary, there exist transcultural legacies that should be put in the limelight and treated as a wellspring of the present-day creativity.
The most important issue about the Transcultural Studies, as I believe, is the understanding of creativity this area provides, the potential that may be derived from a bold, intense interaction with cultural boundaries, culturally imposed limitations, culturally transmitted, repetitive patterns of thinking and doing things. The readiness for cultural transgression and transcultural connectivity fosters freedom of circulation and absorption of ideas, as well as immersion in a boundless global sphere created by the unstoppable human symbol-producing activity. It is precisely by constant contestion of his or her cultural identity, striving to produce new patterns of interference between cultural codes, contaminating the aesthetic and intellectual paradigms, overcoming them rather than striving to illustrate their validity, that the human individual achieves new levels of creativity and insight. A specific philosophy derived from Transcultural Studies fosters a creative attitude that inscribes odd, idiosyncratic elements into an accepted outcome instead of marginalising them or diminishing their potential of difference. It fosters the exploitation of difference as an essential resource, combined with a competency in communicating ideas and insights across cultural frontiers. 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). |
the fields of cultural transgression
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My original contribution to cultural theory is obviously a work-in-progress. Since 2012, I have been experimenting with the notion of cultural transgression, conceptualising culture as a closed perimeter of norms and paradigms that include fields of choice and creativity, hemmed by unyielding boundaries. This definition of culture as an defensive integument of man confronted with the world led me to the interrogation on the possibility of naked humanness, searching reintegration in the flow of non-human existence.
Around 2014-2015, I searched for new ideas and modalities of conceptualisation at the crossroad of humanities, art and contemporary mathematics, thinking about a topology of symbolic space. Such a multidimensional topology, including both the spheres occupied by culture and uncharted existential possibilities, would provide an abstract tool for the reflexion on the extracultural becoming of man, creating enough space for the entire landscape of symbol-making activities of man, both those that find their place in the cultural transmission, and those that may constantly be created by individuals, also the "neurotypical" ones or remain a part of human intimacy, transmissible, only as an exception, to the narrowest circle of other individuals. In this reflection, I build upon the legacy of postmodern philosophy. Among the thinkers that have exerted the greatest influence on my work are Félix Guattari (Chaosmosis, Schizoanalytic cartographies), as well as Giorgio Agamben with his thesis of insufficiency of language (Il linguaggio e la morte) and necessity of exploring the modalities of human not-knowing. |
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[in progress:] “An encounter on the brink of the cultural: Félix Guattari meets Min Tanaka”
The essay's pretext is the encounter of the Japanese dancer Min Tanaka and the postmodern philosopher and psychiatrist Felix Guattari. His thinking about phylum and the theory of subjectivity as a flux are associated with the performances of Tanaka. Their common interest in madness leads to the reflection on the humanness on the brink of the cultural condition, on the humanness that rejects culture, the dominant defensive strategy of man in front of the world. The stake is the reintegration of man in the universe, a new solidarity with plant, animal, rock and the turbulent atmosphere that fills the empty place where bulking human subjectivity is no more. “Krenelaże. Próba nomadyzmu krytycznego” [“Battlements. Essay in critical nomadism”], Anthropos?, no 24/2015, p. 22-31. ISSN 1730-9549
The essay is built around a basic architectonic pattern: that of battlements, alternating cubicles of stone and void. This image is treated as a synecdoche of the city, understood here not as a permanent settlement, but rather, paradoxically, as an empty space that is cyclically occupied by the nomads. The paradigmatic occupation by the newcomers can be found not only in Kafka, but also in Michał Paweł Markowski's book on travel, Dzień na ziemi. On the other hand, the notion of "critical nomadism" is taken from the Machinic Eros, a recent anthology of Guattari's writings on Japan. The problem of occupying space returns in his poem on a butoh dancer, published in this volume. Finally, the interconnection of nomadism and travel is traced back to the 7th century Arabian poet, Ka'b ibn Zuhayr, and his qasida Banat Su'ad. The battlements, architectonic element exploited in the building of Kirin Plaza in Osaka that Guattari compares with the medieval tower in Bologna, illustrates the problem of cyclophrenic rhythms of full and void, mass and empty form, as well as the experience of jet-lag, temporal suspension between 'too early' and 'too late' that is sought after not only by the postmodern tourist, but also by the Bedouin erotic subject, in love with a footprint: an arousing sign of bodily absence. “Topologia w humanistyce. Inspiracje matematyczne a nauki o kulturze” [“Topology in humanities. Mathematical inspirations for cultural studies”], Więcej niż obraz, vol. 1, Eugeniusz Wilk, Anna Nacher, Magdalena Zdrodowska, Ewelina Twardoch, Michał Gulik (eds.), Gdańsk, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra, 2015, p. 489-504. ISBN 978-83-63434-57-1
The visual turn, opening the way to some ground-breaking endeavours, such as the project of Nikolaus Gansterer, 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. |
TOWARDS TRANSCULTURAL HUMANITIES
descriptionThe 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. |
topicsThe program was composed by several synergistic paths or clusters of problems:
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bibliographyDagnino, 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. |
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international journals in cultural theory & cultural analysis
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Founded in 1995, parallax has established an international reputation for bringing together outstanding new work in cultural studies, critical theory and philosophy. parallax publishes themed issues that aim to provoke exploratory, interdisciplinary thinking and response. Each issue of parallax provides a forum for a wide spectrum of perspectives on a topical question or concern. parallax will be of interest to those working in cultural studies, critical theory, cultural history, philosophy, gender studies, queer theory, post-colonial theory, English and comparative literature, aesthetics, art history and visual cultures.
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tpar20/current |
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Cultural Studies publishes articles, reviews, critiques, artwork, and other forms of cultural and intellectual production from across the humanities and social sciences. Cultural Studies welcomes empirically-rich, politically-engaged research that critically engages: Techniques, institutions, and systems of power; Formations of resistance, activism, and intervention; The history, politics, and philosophy of media/technology; Feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; Theories and practices of globalization; The histories and long-term effects of colonialism; Race theory and ethnic studies; The cultural politics of language/communication/keywords; Science, technology, and environmental studies; Cultural traditions and creative industries; The histories and definitions of the word “culture”; The histories, politics, and global formations of cultural studies.
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Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue is a multidisciplinary academic journal founded by Otago Polytechnic Te Kura Matatini ki Otago in 2003 as a forum for trans-disciplinary discussion, analysis, and critique. Junctures encourages discussion across boundaries, whether these are disciplinary, geographic, cultural, social or economic. Junctures embraces the long established fields of the humanities, arts, science, law, medicine and philosophy, as well as engaging with the challenges of more recent disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. Each issue of Junctures is organised as a site of encounter around a theme. With New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region as a backdrop, but not its only stage, Junctures seeks to address the matters which concern us all as we negotiate the contemporary environment.
https://junctures.org/index.php/junctures |
