Tim Hailand

BELIEVE

NYC 1998		  


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Transculture: Mikhail Epstein - After the Future:
The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture

 Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, pp. 280-306.
Mikhail Epstein / Culture - Culturology - Transculture

M.Epstein's Virtual Library Catalog

For the past two decades, the concepts of post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-history, and post-industrialism have dominated the theoretical scene in the West. I would like to suggest that this "post-" paradigm itself may now be a thing of the past. The present era, which seems to have begun with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, needs to be redefined, probably in terms of "proto-" rather than "post-." As far as theory and the arts are concerned, the twentieth century, began well before the year 1900, and the twenty-first century may be under way already. One of the major factors that will determine its cultural identity is the idea of pluralism, which has gained recognition throughout the world, acquiring particular importance in the former Soviet Union. Paradoxically, the world-wide dissemination of pluralism has served to break down its character as a specifically Western, liberal idea, while also serving to revive the value of cultural unity or integrity. We live in a more pluralistic world, but it is a single world, which was previously divided into East and West (along with other internal divisions as well).

Moreover, the type of pluralism that predominated in Western culture of the 1970s and 1980s contained strong elements of relativism, and tended to ignore or even undermine the very notion of unity. Some postmodern thinkers have theorized "culture" as something specific to each separate nation, race, gender, age group, and so on. Now that a pluralistic worldview has increasingly come to prevail from Moscow to Berlin and, hopefully, also to Beijing and Havana, the promising perspectives of transcultural human identity become ever more tangible. To define the patterns of this new unity based on pluralistic values should be, in my view, the most immediate aim of the contemporary humanities. (If the reader will kindly bear with me in the more or less simultaneous exposition of various aspects of a few key ideas, I will come to a definition of what I mean by "transculture" after first focusing on more basic notions.)

The notion of "proto-unity" emphasizes the positive values of spiritual "totality" which were so monstrously perverted by Eastern totalitarianism. The concepts of "organic collectivism/conciliarism" (sobornost') and "integrative knowledge" (tsel'noe znanie) have long been intrinsic to traditional Russian culture, so that it was almost natural for the political authorities to exploit these concepts in pursuing their own ends. It is not surprising that one and the same set of ideas may be pressed into the service of essentially incompatible philosophies if we recall, for example, that Russian intellectuals of diverse persuasions have invariably argued for the inner unification of a human being's various capacities. How will this essentially Eastern tenet be assimilated into the proto-unity of future civilization?

Furthermore, one must question whether or not the multiple cultural types--ethnic, local, sexual, professional, which are emerging in the United States as well as post-communist Russia and many other places--are really self-sufficient, or do they depend upon each other to provide the foundation for a future cultural synthesis? How can diverse cultural identities merge without relinquishing their individual peculiarities?

These problems have been posed in the past by German romanticists, American transcendentalists, and Russian religious thinkers, and now, on the eve of the twenty-first century, they regain their vital significance. Not only multicultural, but transcultural consciousness promises to be a defining characteristic of this new age, as numerous existing cultures search for the broadest possible framework to shape their interactions. This search calls into question such conventional assumptions as "East and West," "integration and pluralism," which have often been distorted and interpreted as polar opposites. I propose to elaborate a theoretical model which will 1) disentangle the concepts of "totality" and "totalitarianism," (2) free pluralism from indifferent or cynical relativism, and (3) demonstrate how pluralism and totality need not be construed as contradictory values.

My primary focus will be the formation of a mentality which I call "transcultural consciousness," as it has evolved in Russia over the course of the past 20 some years. In conclusion I will also draw a number of parallels with the American concept of multiculturalism.