exploring the edge
where cultural transmission ends and the extracultural begins
Postmodern humanities have become accustomed to such terms as deflation, deskilling, unlearning, and dememorization. Yet Giorgio Agamben’s postulate of creating an epistemology of ignorance—present in his work since the late 1970s, beginning with his writings on Hegel’s return to Eleusis and culminating in the small volume La ragazza indicibile: mito e mistero di Kore (2010)—has remained without significant posteriority. It is therefore time to pose a radical question about destroying, transgressing, or transcending the cultural automatisms in which we are nurtured and by which we are constantly shaped. Such a questioning may lead to novel insights on the human removed from its cultural envelope, remaining—whether for one reason or another, even such reasons as incurable disease or congenital defect—on a pre-cultural level. What about the human who, in madness, refuses to bend to culturally predetermined rules and patterns of behaviour? What about humanity confronted with an apocalyptic event that shatters all cultural norms and leaves the individual in a state of absolute nakedness?
Deflation is originally an economic term, referring to a long-term decline in the average price level, which translates into an increase in the purchasing power of money. In a broader, metaphorical sense, deflation signifies a departure from a high level of cultural functioning: a resignation from the overload of excessively complex normative systems, a return to the zero point, to the initial, basic level of the human body—unrestrained and devoid of exuberant subjectivity (and thus not tamed, beyond the Foucaultian assujettissement: subjection, subjugation, and subjectivation). Ultimately, this may result in a peculiar “increase in purchasing power” not only in the bodily but also in the spiritual domain, leading to the opening of new insight. Deflationary in nature is also the question of humanity beyond culture: humanity stripped of its cultural habits and competencies, left naked—deprived of the cultural envelope that under ordinary conditions protects fragile humanity from sharp collisions with the world. This deflationary understanding of the human is based on resignation, emptying, the loss of sophisticated competencies, and an entry into the realm of ignorance and darkness.
In Christian terminology, this willingness to give up the secular burden of culture corresponds to the Pauline concept of kenosis in Philippians 2:7, which states that Christ “emptied himself.” Analogous ideas appear in other world religions: for instance, the fanāʾ of Muslim mystics or the figure of the hoopoe, who flaunts its magnificent crest only to lose its feathers in the fire of love. If—following the great scholars of religion of the first half of the twentieth century—mysticism, whose local, culturally specific expressions largely resonate with one another, testifies to a universal sphere of human experience, then similar categories may also be found within such circles as Zen Buddhism. Be that as it may, my aim is to see how, in the end (individual or apocalyptic), man is driven toward deflation by universal determinants of the human condition: madness, aging, and death.
Deflation is originally an economic term, referring to a long-term decline in the average price level, which translates into an increase in the purchasing power of money. In a broader, metaphorical sense, deflation signifies a departure from a high level of cultural functioning: a resignation from the overload of excessively complex normative systems, a return to the zero point, to the initial, basic level of the human body—unrestrained and devoid of exuberant subjectivity (and thus not tamed, beyond the Foucaultian assujettissement: subjection, subjugation, and subjectivation). Ultimately, this may result in a peculiar “increase in purchasing power” not only in the bodily but also in the spiritual domain, leading to the opening of new insight. Deflationary in nature is also the question of humanity beyond culture: humanity stripped of its cultural habits and competencies, left naked—deprived of the cultural envelope that under ordinary conditions protects fragile humanity from sharp collisions with the world. This deflationary understanding of the human is based on resignation, emptying, the loss of sophisticated competencies, and an entry into the realm of ignorance and darkness.
In Christian terminology, this willingness to give up the secular burden of culture corresponds to the Pauline concept of kenosis in Philippians 2:7, which states that Christ “emptied himself.” Analogous ideas appear in other world religions: for instance, the fanāʾ of Muslim mystics or the figure of the hoopoe, who flaunts its magnificent crest only to lose its feathers in the fire of love. If—following the great scholars of religion of the first half of the twentieth century—mysticism, whose local, culturally specific expressions largely resonate with one another, testifies to a universal sphere of human experience, then similar categories may also be found within such circles as Zen Buddhism. Be that as it may, my aim is to see how, in the end (individual or apocalyptic), man is driven toward deflation by universal determinants of the human condition: madness, aging, and death.
how do I work on these concepts?
I have been quietly developing an innovative theoretical approach to the relation between the notions of the human and the cultural since 2012. Initially, my idea was to question the apparent obviousness of the human condition as necessarily and exclusively a cultured one. Existential circumstances such as madness, disease, or decrepitude may be interpreted as events that strip the human being of his/her protective cultural integument, forcing the individual to experience reality in an extracultural manner—beyond the usual, learned (i.e. culturally transmitted) patterns and paradigms of reaction. Apocalyptic events, understood as moments of disruption of norms and rituals (the kairos of Christian eschatology), may offer insight into a sphere that cannot be explored at other times, when cultural transmission proceeds unperturbed and uninterrupted. The novel outcomes of such disruptive events continually become part of subsequent cultural transmission. Any invention of new forms attacks and undermines the frontiers of the culturally given, yet simultaneously contributes to the expansion of the boundaries of culturally codified experience.
In my Polish works in cultural theory, such as the collection of essays Humanistyka, która nadchodzi (The Coming Humanities, 2018), I reflected on culture as a phenomenon of transmission—a totality of what we learn from other human beings and what we are invited to reproduce as faithfully as possible, with minimal modification. This static and stabilising potential of culture requires critical vigilance. Moreover, culture is essentially a feature of community: it determines, dominates, and normalises the individual. Bearing in mind this oppressive, overwhelming, limiting, and potentially destructive character of cultural transmission, I am profoundly interested in exploring the elements that cultures marginalise, reject, and disqualify—those that accumulate at their silenced and forgotten frontiers.
Collectively and individually experienced times of exception—periods in which normally valid cultural paradigms and procedures lose their efficacy and authority—play a crucial role in the extracultural growth I describe above. They bring about the revelation of previously unexplored, uncharted modalities of being human beyond the culturally predetermined subjectivity. As I argue, it is possible to overcome culture understood as a totality of transmitted and automatized habits. The cultural condition, although it appears inherent to every human being, may in fact be transgressed; cultures may be unlearnt, de-essentialized, transformed from consolidated masses into a filigree. Such a process of unlearning and de-automatizing reactions that are usually channelled through culturally determined paradigms may yield a progressive expansion of insight, awareness, autonomy, and choice. These positive legacies persist, as their transmission only partially enters the established cultural paradigms. Consider, for instance, the silence of a Zen master who attempts to indicate the path to illumination to his apprentice.
The reflection on the extracultural becoming of the human implies a somewhat pessimistic definition of culture as a restrictive, repetitive drill. I assume that human beings—or at least certain exceptional, maverick individuals—constantly clash with cultural limitations; a perpetual struggle is waged in the borderlands of culture. I seek to demonstrate what motivates the necessity of such radical criticism of the cultural and the search for extracultural modalities of being human.
Yet if the temptation is relatively easy to capture and define, a much more difficult question remains: how might I access this outer sphere of the extracultural, and what do I expect to find there? In fact, I presume that cultural traditions are rich in traces of past extracultural experiences—traces that are nearly obliterated, barely legible, yet still discoverable and interpretable. Extracultural becoming may not be as novel, hypothetical, or unexplored as we are inclined to believe. On the contrary, the uncharted sphere of the extracultural may be a repeatedly and assiduously visited; it may even a resource for individuals who choose to seek liberty, bliss, beauty, fulfilment, or intimacy with the non-human, beyond what would otherwise be their culturally limited destiny.
In my Polish works in cultural theory, such as the collection of essays Humanistyka, która nadchodzi (The Coming Humanities, 2018), I reflected on culture as a phenomenon of transmission—a totality of what we learn from other human beings and what we are invited to reproduce as faithfully as possible, with minimal modification. This static and stabilising potential of culture requires critical vigilance. Moreover, culture is essentially a feature of community: it determines, dominates, and normalises the individual. Bearing in mind this oppressive, overwhelming, limiting, and potentially destructive character of cultural transmission, I am profoundly interested in exploring the elements that cultures marginalise, reject, and disqualify—those that accumulate at their silenced and forgotten frontiers.
Collectively and individually experienced times of exception—periods in which normally valid cultural paradigms and procedures lose their efficacy and authority—play a crucial role in the extracultural growth I describe above. They bring about the revelation of previously unexplored, uncharted modalities of being human beyond the culturally predetermined subjectivity. As I argue, it is possible to overcome culture understood as a totality of transmitted and automatized habits. The cultural condition, although it appears inherent to every human being, may in fact be transgressed; cultures may be unlearnt, de-essentialized, transformed from consolidated masses into a filigree. Such a process of unlearning and de-automatizing reactions that are usually channelled through culturally determined paradigms may yield a progressive expansion of insight, awareness, autonomy, and choice. These positive legacies persist, as their transmission only partially enters the established cultural paradigms. Consider, for instance, the silence of a Zen master who attempts to indicate the path to illumination to his apprentice.
The reflection on the extracultural becoming of the human implies a somewhat pessimistic definition of culture as a restrictive, repetitive drill. I assume that human beings—or at least certain exceptional, maverick individuals—constantly clash with cultural limitations; a perpetual struggle is waged in the borderlands of culture. I seek to demonstrate what motivates the necessity of such radical criticism of the cultural and the search for extracultural modalities of being human.
Yet if the temptation is relatively easy to capture and define, a much more difficult question remains: how might I access this outer sphere of the extracultural, and what do I expect to find there? In fact, I presume that cultural traditions are rich in traces of past extracultural experiences—traces that are nearly obliterated, barely legible, yet still discoverable and interpretable. Extracultural becoming may not be as novel, hypothetical, or unexplored as we are inclined to believe. On the contrary, the uncharted sphere of the extracultural may be a repeatedly and assiduously visited; it may even a resource for individuals who choose to seek liberty, bliss, beauty, fulfilment, or intimacy with the non-human, beyond what would otherwise be their culturally limited destiny.
ongoing work
The extracultural becoming:
Min Tanaka’s symbiotic/synthanatic dissolution
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Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, vol. 12, issue 1, July 2026: "(Re)imagining symbiosis"
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