or: The Transculturalism and its Intertexts
Theory offers us today a lot of “application” terminology. These are being encouragingly enough applied in the daily speech as well as in the written texts, either if we want to estimate the unseriousness, or the seriousness of human games. However, it is a consequent question that follows as to whether we know to what we are dealing with when we apply these; which poses a difficult answer on its own terms. That’s the reason why we say that the explanation of the dinstinctive significatios by way of the initial applicative theoretical concetptions becomes a precondition of the real comperhending of the contemporarary (theatre) aesthetics, and by that, as well a precondition of our personal standpoint towards it and its limitations. In the circle of such limitations the conceptions of transculturalism belong. Owing to the fact that the transculturalism becomes a hardly understandable category, if we try to determine it in the context of its intertexts, in this paper I will try to touch the following questions:
1. What is postmodernism, pluralism, marginalism, multiculturalism, syncretism, acculturation, and the interculturalism ( or transculturalism) – by which I give concise explanations concerning the dinstictive features of these conceptions:
2. What the theatre transculturalism is – by which I refer to some concrete connotations implied in the very said conceptions themselves:1F
The texture and its junctures
The crises of the categorization, balancing of the various perspectives of the absence of their homogenization are syntagms which Jean Françoais Lyotard has been trying to determine in terms of the conception of the postmodern (ibid., The Postmodern State: information concerning meaning). In case me, as a reader of a postmodern work, would have been limited in the very conception signification and would have said the following: even though I know that what am I reading or seeing is perfectly clear, I will tell you about the meaning of the work after I will have read it several times, only after its meaining would be reflected to me as whole, or, in the shape of the wholesome totality. If you ask me why, I’ll answer to you in the shape of this question: can we refuse the fact that the postmodern work of art is divided (or decomposed) into many pieces?2F Isn’t it true that the meaining of those pieces are, said in Derrida’s way, disseminated meanings or significations? You will say: on the one hand I talk about the disseminated meanings, but on the other, I mention some wholesome meaning. Isn’t that a contradiction? No, that is not a contradiction. In order that I am even clearer during this explanation of mine, what I have called a wholesome meaning, I will further complete with that meaning which I’d like to call now an essential meaning3F – semantically close to the momental and nostalgic meaning4F We talk here – conditionally taken – for that general meaning which is gained through reflection and which, on one hand, moves up the artistic value of the work of art in the midst of the place of the work itself, and on the other hand, that midst place is allowed for the very act of reproduction, the self-observing and irony. That reflexive component gains the role of the non-visible guide in direction of the discourse, or said with by words, it gains exactly that role which in another context M. Bakhtin calls the role of the third in the dialogue5F The wholesome or the essential meaning is, according to this, a part of that reflexive component, and as a whole for itself it positions itself as the main value of the postmodern creation.
The determining of postmodernism is also linked to the determining of modernism with all its limitations and shortages of this movement6F. Except that, the defining of that which would mean a movement called (post)modernism in, for example, literature, linguistics, theater, film, painting, music, architecture, etc.; what will be defined as the (post)modern era in one discipline, doesn’t necessarily communicate by what is intended by the (post)modernism of the other discipline7F. Anyway, what we can determine now as a common characteristics of the postmodern expression, is comprised in the launching of the double function, or, in the identification of the pluralism which should be respected.
We can deduce from this that the conception pluralism is implied in the very conception of postmodernism. Its integral part is, if of course because of methodological reasons we divide the last of what we previously said, and then we’ll have the right to read it as an undertext built in the text matrix, which is otherwise called, postmodernism.
Before I say that this last text is, as the matter of fact, the subtext of the interculturalism, I will talk for a moment for the conception of pluralism intended as a separate conception, in order to give a short explanation around the semantic and paradigmatic meaning of the word marginalism.
As a matter of fact, when we talk of pluralism, it is suggested that in the given discourse the alternatives should be presented, which is losing the dominant hegemony. The essence of pluralism is the recognizing of the main alternatives (the question from who it immediately puts forwards and here it is identified I would say – the implicit domination of the passive voice within the verbs8F), but as well, of the other possibilities. And exactly marginalism would give accridation to the additive perspectives, by which the theory is moved up to the margins themselves.
A main characteristic of the postmodernism, pluralism and marginalism is the recognizing of the differences. However, as we can learn from the works of of some authors, like for example, Jean Baudrillard, Peter Burger or Andreas Huyssen, this recognition of the differences is drawn to a full indifference.By other words, postmodernism, which is as a matter of fact egocentric, as if giving to us a radical statement which says: if I’m not dominant – and I’m not dominant by the simple fact that I have to recognize the values of the other – if besides me it or he must exist, and not only me, then nothing more is important, everything must be equal.
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1. In this paper I don’t follow the stated points scheduling them orderly, but I rather make a combination of them. That is the way I create the simplest grounds to introduce the practical part of the theater transculturalism.
2. We should make a parallel here with the decomposed body of Jacques Lacan. That should then be taken as grounds for the possible comparing of the Lacan’s Other by the word (the) other (in the sense of the other, non-imperialistic culture), which I expose further.
3. I’m talking about the possibility of determining the essential meaning of the postmodern values, starting from the fact that the meaning ( Bedeutung) is different from the value ( Wert). Differing from the meaning, the value belongs to the experience of the conscious present. The values are not linked among themselves in a systematical way. Because of that, the essential meaning will be determined as a large context of the fourth moment of the Dylthayian Erlebnis (ibid.1927).
4. The nostalgic meaning is used here in the sense of the restored meaning (comp. the restored behaviour) of Richard Schechner (ibid., 1987). In both syntagms, the element of self-observing is included.
5. The role of the third in the dialogue is, as a matter of fact, the gathering and plotting of the motivations in the structure of an experience.
6. In the essay The crises of the modern aesthetics Frederick Turner talks about the protest of the movement called modernism (ibid. Performing Arts journal, 1991). The author thinks that modernism is an example of a real protest, which eliminates the shortages of its predecessors. By that he destroys them, and, as he says, the basic human systems and all of that which had been sealed in theses systems.That is the reason why he describes modernism as oedipal, adolescent, protest (ibid), which, in order to gain self-existence, kills its fathers. Then, he says that exactly because of this reason modernism could be read as a destructive one, nihlistic one, suicidal and an unmature act, as a work which uses an extra-energy in the direction of its destroying, leaving aside the possibilities of recycling, regneration and regain. (ibid.). It’s worth mentioning here also the explanation of the conception of ressentment, in the shape that F. Nietzsche offers to us.
7. Robert Venturi, one of the leading theoretitians of the postmodern architecture, says that a characteristics of his era is the avoiding of what is considered as modern, or the avoiding of the clean lines of the moderate monumentalism. Instead of these elements, the polysemy and the bended lines should prevail.
8. In this context we could include the question of the subject of the discourse as a separate theme. The approach would belog to a linguistic nature.