Breaking News:
the Company has withdrawn investment in Zanzibar, due to fascist homophobic brutality and illegal laws by the government.
Shhh!
In the period before the German Disaster, nationally based cultures were mobilized in support of national interests. Cultures were defined as those things not being the cultures of others.
Nations were defined as peoples having a common geography, history, economics, language and culture (shared by all classes and genders) and a common psychology.
Treaty discussions catered to inherent and intrinsic commonalities.
Transcultural architecture, though, is a process rather than building to design. Every day you must show up with something you have carried with you a long way and fit it in, without nails.
There is a fundamental, continuous rejection of any notion of inherent characteristics or intrinsic beliefs in an encounter between persons of different cultures. It is experimental.
Facts are confirmed by negations of experimental overtures.
Empathy is practiced beyond ritual and convention, by giving full time and space to hearing and understanding the associations and meanings of ‘the other.’
It turns out that our neo-colonial activity will be halted by Indigenous cultural affirmation. On a deeper level, isn’t it ironic that postmodernism is not as much fun as liberal academics said it would be.
Instead, identity politics based on the wrenching of dead corpses from our neural patterns is on.
A method for understanding the whole life of the other is built without finding evidence of inherent, absolute characteristics relating to mental health,
even though some modern diplomacy rejects an assumption of inherent national or group interests or a stable and inherent attitude and the transcultural approach rejects notions of the absolute origin of personality type or behaviour in gender, race, class or family history,
eschewing absolute mind and permanent readings.
Instead, it constructs.
Some practices of transcultural diplomacy extend beyond the promotion of national arts and academic institutions to the promotion of localized creation and the exchange of capacities,
an adhoc process that runs parallel to national level diplomacy,
establishing and influencing third party supra-national structures and collective interest groupings to mediate transcultural conflict emerging from interaction with the global system.
It has been largely successful.
National-level diplomacy has not, because that is not its goal. It is a comedy of cultural encounters and of manners, a coming-of-age memoir, moving from the old village to the modern world, post-colonial in politics and attitude, within an exotic setting.
It is entertainment, like “traditional” dancing.
It is clear that some people get a real charge out of leaders who make politics and life comedic in deeply fascist theatre: democratic one moment, feudalist the next and ribald macho by dinner.
Those dispossessed and depersonalised by modernism love it. To have a violent character to look at and love. To be absorbed into.
The transcultural novel does not pay the ransom for an older point in the transculture.
It is other, not a delusion unfolded to a therapist, an account of a collaborative creation of a fantasy, a proposal of a discourse of imaginations, a comparison of framework and boundaries, or a comparison of psychologies and mythologies.
A transcultural novel is written for mainstream reading, often by a transcultural individual, usually about a journey, during which a relationship is built in a strange landscape with someone who is ‘other’. It makes the unfamiliar familiar to the reader. Every night now is wrested from peace.
The pedagogy of creative writing is complementary.
It reveals the effectiveness of individual narratives in encounters with social context. It constructs a culture, while disassociating from a dysfunctional one.
Opposing solitudes in world conflicts encounter each other as an amalgam of other and self.
The transcultural architect recognizes that narrative is not everything anymore. It is the obvious theatric pantomime that is, that where it was once the novelists, the Eng. Lit. graduates and pornographers who strategized the politics, it is now failed P.R. persons and anarchist lunatics.
When drawing up your building plans, check out their advisers. See what they have written. See their literature.
- Is it like yours?
- Do you feel you need a few theses against it?
- Is it post-modern,
- obviously undeniable,
- narcissistic,
- opiate virtuosity,
- imperialistic nudity,
- armed,
- infinitely wired
- and patrolled by drones?
Culture is forbidding and allowing.
The Barbarians at the gates
It shows language organizing experience. The novel is an exposition of identity in society and of the effectiveness of culture, although there is not yet a truly postcolonial narrator nor a decolonized reader. But you are still here.
There is hope.