On this page
  A treatise on trans

  On the other pages
  Postmodernist Bladerunner?
  Editorial 1 from LAIC
  Editorial 2 from LAIC

Transcultural communication: A treatise on trans

Having now spoken twice in its defence, this is not to say that I remain, even at this late stage in my current programme of research, totally satisfied with the notion of intercultural communication per se. In Chapter 6, for example, I offered the following slippery definition of intercultural communication:

Whenever the parties to a communication act bring with them different experiential backgrounds that reflect a long-standing deposit of group experience, knowledge and values, we have intercultural communication (Samovar & Porter, 1991).

I also noted that any such definition begs the question, how different do the ‘backgrounds’ have to be for communication to cease being intracultural and start being intercultural. With this in mind, and as a tentative contribution to contemporary debates about culture and communication, I would like to register my increasing dissatisfaction with the terms intercultural and cross-cultural in relation to communication. (This is, I hope, more than just the palliative attempt of an anal-retentive to tidy up the apparent confusion of nomenclature in the field!)

The main point is, that it has started to become apparent to me that these terms have little social or phenomenological relevance for the young people with whom I have been working. I am also concerned that intercultural simply fails to resist the essentializing, "territorial view" (Streeck, 1994:286) of culture – the notion that one can ever really be positioned between cultural systems. As such, the term continues to persuade us that it is cultural systems not individuals which are in communication with each other (Scollon & Wong Scollon, 1995:125). Equally, cross-cultural, to my mind and as it is commonly used in many academic fields, perpetuates a undue preoccupation with cultural difference and comparison. It always runs the risk of promoting both the "ideational islands" (Sarangi, 1994:415) and the "cultures collide" conceptions (Blommaert, 1991:19) of culture. Admittedly, as Derrida notes (above), the signifieds are changing, are being forced to change, in accordance with academic reorientations, but I see no reason why the signifiers themselves shouldn’t change as a more resolute ditching of their anachronistic vestiges.

Alternatively (and this does not necessarily resolve these concerns), perhaps academics should at least be more specific in what they mean, and refer only ever to intergroup or interethnic communication, or, the case of foreign language teaching, international communication. Of course, all such categorizations are always contextual and contingent. But can any communication ever be anything other than cultural – cross, trans, inter, multi, whatever? Is it all only ever interpersonal communication anyway – again, in the sense that it is people not cultures that communicate? Either all communication is intercultural or no communication is intercultural. At the very least, as I suggested in Chapter 6, that which is commonly called ‘intercultural communication’ is in the eye of the beholder anyway. Perhaps it is for this reason precisely that Humphrey (1998) has suggested that we talk in terms of culture as an individual phenomenon – that each person be considered ‘culturally unique’. Fair enough, perhaps, but surely culture is by very definition and experience always a shared (i.e. group) phenomenon? As such, Humphrey’s suggestion does not quite satisfy.

Although hesitantly abandoned by Humphrey (1998), I still prefer the sense transcultural creates of moving through and across cultural systems, in whatever way they may be constituted or conceived. It allows better, I think, for the fluidity of these systems, their porous boundaries and constantly reorienting expressions, as well as the conceptual spaces that open up between traditionally defined cultural systems – the putative ‘Third Space’ of Bhabha (1994) and the borderlands of Anzaldúa (1987) – that emerge between shifting patterns of sociocultural organisation and practice. At the risk of labouring my point, with its implication of movement, transcultural also more generously accommodates the journeying, "creative ways" and "provisional homes" described by Phipps (1999:25) after Clifford (1988). In a similar vein, but a different academic context, Ribeiro (1998:327) argues, as a political scientist, for transnationalism (as opposed to internationalism), describing it in terms of a space which is "diffused, disseminated in a web or a network" and which creates a domain of "political contestation and cultural ambience that is not equivalent to the space we normally experience".

Being in the 'beyond', then, is to inhabit an intervening space, as any dictionary will tell you. But to dwell 'in the beyond' is also, as I have shown, to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality. (Bhabha, 1994:7)

This idea of transcultural communication certainly strikes me as being more true to the communication of many of the multi-ethnic young people I have been working with. Of course, trans also carries the transcendent connotation of beyond – perhaps, therefore, signifying a transcending of essentialist ideas about culture as something unified, reified and possessed? It is at this point that the term conveniently converges with some of the ideas of the Russian postmodern theorist, Epstein (1995:10), whose notion of ‘transculture’ simultaneously indexes "a mode of being" at the "cross-roads" of cultural systems as well as a liberation from the "self-deification and fetishism" of specific cultural groups. Coincidentally, also, this short treatise on trans ties in nicely with Tomic & Lengel’s (1998) persuasive endorsement of ‘transformation’ in terms of cultural awareness, rather than ‘competence’ or ‘capability’ – ideas with which Fairclough (1992) and his colleagues have long been dissatisfied.

Commenting on Derrida’s earlier ideas of ‘thinking at the limit’ or ‘double writing’, and returning me to where I started, Hall (1996) offers a more pragmatic resolution of this dilemma. He comments on the ‘erasure’ (which is to say, deconstruction, detotalization, decentering) of previously essentialist notions of, in his case, identity – cultural, ethnic, national and otherwise. Arguably, much the same may be said of ‘culture’ and, more importantly, the notion of ‘intercultural’? In the face of this, and in much the same way that ‘identity’ has come to signify ‘identification’, Hall (1996: 1) would opt instead for a reconceptualization of the term rather than throwing the signifier baby out with the signified bath water.

Since they have not been superseded dialectically, and there are no other, entirely different concepts with which to replace them, there is nothing to do but to continue to think with them - albeit in their detotalized and deconstructed forms, and no longer operating within the paradigm in which they were originally generated.

On this basis, it is not after all the term ‘intercultural communication’ which is at fault as much as it is the conceptualizations which underpin it and the assumptions which it engenders.

References

Andalzúa, G. (1987). Borderlands – la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.

Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.

Blommaert, J. (1991). How much culture is there in intercultural communication? In J. Blommaert & J. Verschueren (Eds), The pragmatics of intercultural and international communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Clifford, J. (1998). The predicament of culture: Twentieth century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Derrida, J. (1981). Positions (trans. Bass, A.). London: Athlone Press.

Epstein, M. (1995). After the Future: The paradoxes of postmodernism and contemporary Russian culture. Available (31/11/99): http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/ af.culturology.html

Fairclough, N. (Ed.). (1992a). Critical language awareness. Harlow: Longman.

Hall, S. (1996). Introduction: Who needs ‘identity’? In S. Hall and P. du Gay (Eds), Questions of cultural identity. London: Sage.

Humphrey, D. (1998). Culture as noun, culture as verb, national culture or individual culture: which approach? In D. Killick & M. Parry (Eds), Languages for cross-cultural capability: Promoting the discipline: Marking boundaries & crossing borders. Proceedings of the 3^rd Cross-cultural Capability Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University, 12-14 December.

Phipps, A. (1998). Provisional homes and creative practice: languages, cultural studies and anthropology. In D. Killick & M. Parry (Eds), Languages for cross-cultural capability: Promoting the discipline: Marking boundaries & crossing borders. Proceedings of the 3^rd Cross-cultural Capability Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University, 12-14 December.

Ribeiro,GL (1998): Cybercultural politics. In S.E. Alvarez, E. Dagnino, & A.Escobar (Eds), Cultures of politics, politics of cultures: Revisioning Latin American social movements. Boulder,CO: Westview Press.

Samovar, L. A., & Porter, R. E. (Eds). (1991). Intercultural communication: A reader. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Sarangi, S. (1994). Intercultural or not? Beyond celebration of cultural differences in miscommunication analysis. Pragmatics, 4(3), 409-427.

Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S. (1995). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. Oxford: Blackwell.

Streeck, J. (1994). Culture, meaning and interpersonal communication. In M. L. Knapp & G. R. Miller (Eds), Handbook of interpersonal communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Tomic, A. & Lengel, L. (1998). Negotiating a "third space": Pedagogy which encourages transformational intercultural communication education. In D. Killick & M. Parry (Eds), Languages for cross-cultural capability: Promoting the discipline: Marking boundaries & crossing borders. Proceedings of the 3^rd Cross-cultural Capability Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University, 12-14 December.

Source

This slightly revised extract from my doctoral thesis is also based on a section of the following paper:

Thurlow, C. (2001). "I don't have one - it's just normal." Young teenagers' ideas about 'culture': Critical transcultural communication awareness and the exoticisation of Self. In D. Killick & M. Parry (Eds), Mapping the territory: The poetics and praxis of languages and intercultural communication. Glasgow: Glasgow French & German Publications.