the acceptance of that difference should be the starting point of any communication; (2) that contacts between the two blocs have been and have to remain external: the blocs can only (or at least primarily) relate to each other as separate entities whose separateness, whose difference, defines/colors every phenomenon within a bloc, as well as every perception of all phenomena from the other bloc; and (3) that, since the two blocs’ histories have been very different, there is no common cultural space they can draw on in their attempts to communicate.
Although, on one level, these assumptions appear to be quite obviously true, on another none of them quite holds. (1) The blocs were not as ideologically different as popularly thought: for one, their propaganda techniques against each other were quite similar;5 then, although there were ideological differences, many of their respective educational canons were similar (great books, great philosophers, great scientific discoveries); finally, they were both part of Euro/Western civilization and subscribed to some of the same cultural and economic goals and ideals: industrialization, urbanization, logocentrism, and so on. (2) The blocs’ boundaries (borders) were not impermeable: popular and other cultural products, people, political and financial interests, and such like, constantly seeped through, ensuring the continued presence of the other bloc on each of their soils (for example, rock music and popular movies went East, ballet and Russian literary classics traveled West). (3) This constant seepage, together with other globalizing trends,6 has worked toward creating (or, rather, maintaining?) a common cultural space which frequently (under the cold-war paradigm) went unrecognized.
In other words, an assumption of across-the-board difference between Eastern and Western blocs may not be accurate; furthermore, this assumed difference may not always be descriptive but rather prescriptive: it postulates a difference between the blocs, and this postulate is then imposed on the actual diversity which exists inside the blocs in such a way that only certain characteristics — those which are different — are considered authentic and scholarly acceptable while others are ignored as unclear, or rather, impure. In short, this process as much produces new differences between blocs as it reflects differences which already do exist. It follows that not only is the identity which I am invited to represent a culturally constructed category (and so is the very position of difference from which I am encouraged to speak), but the label “Yugoslavian women” also implies far more difference from all other, non-Yugoslavian, women and far more internal homogeneity among Yugoslavian women than exists in reality. (Among other things, this might not be good for the project which it seeks to support — namely, openness to cultural difference and a “better,” safer, more peaceful world — since it is, in fact, yet another kind of homogenization.)
Cornel West points out that “notions of the ‘real Black community’ and ‘positive’ image are value-laden, socially loaded, and ideologically charged.”7 So is the category of women in Yugoslavia. And so are the concepts of the two blocs, American and Soviet, as good and bad, as free and behind the iron curtain. Recognizing this might be comparable to what Stuart Hall calls “the end of [Black] innocence”; the “recognition that ‘Black’ is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category.”8 Facing the cultural constructedness of categories such as Yugoslavian women and Eastern Bloc, means not only the end of “innocence” which characterized the cold-war paradigm and the desire for cross-bloc communication, but also a realization that the opening up of the “fircond” world, theoretically at least, calls for a redefinition of both blocs’ discourses; that both labels — “the free world” and the “world behind the iron curtain” — need to be rethought. Only then will all the diverse voices (such as those of different national cultures, various ethnic groups, women, different classes, etc.) during the cold war subsumed under homogenizing bloc labels, fully emerge.
Ill
The Transcultural. The following question remains: how do we talk to one another and about cultures and identities in the global village of the late twentieth century, after the end of the cold war, and within an awareness of cultural diversity (not only within and across the former blocs, but globally)? Or, in other words: what is the nature of the contemporary cultural world?
While attempting to fully answer this is well beyond the scope of this essay, I would like to tentatively propose some ways of thinking about it.
First, it might be useful to ask this: when we say that we are communicating with one another as groups (or as members of different groups), in what space is that communication occurring? Is there a larger space in which all this is happening? In other words, is there a space which in some ways transcends (by being around them, in-between them, and within them) the individual categories such as Eastern Bloc, Western Bloc, Women in Yugoslavia, and other cultural (identity) labels? If so, what is the nature of this space?
Second, we might problematize the pronoun “we,” or, for that matter, the pronoun “I,” as loci of clear and separate group identities. While in some extreme situations, such as wars or national and ethnic tensions, a sense that the communicating parties belong to opposing groups may indeed cover over everything else (in other words, national or ethnic identity may be foregrounded), in most cases a splintering of the communication into a number of less focused (and possibly less divisive) fragments will occur. The people involved might be wearing similar clothes, have similar tastes in music and films, or similar family situations and problems. In other words, as an I in a communication process, I am a member of numerous groups (oldest children, nonsmokers, rock fans, scholars, dissidents, liberals, women, etc.) which might intersect with the groups of the person I am communicating with. This both opens potential common space we can use in our relationship and problematizes the clarity and simplicity of our respective affiliations to national or ethnic groups that we come from (as well as, for that matter, to any one of the mentioned groups). In other words, our affiliations are more complex, more numerous, and less stable than paradigms such as the cold-war one might suggest.
I believe that this points to a cultural space that we can, for lack of a better word, label “transcultural.” This does not mean a transcendence into some kind of a universal and eternal space, beyond history and experience, but, rather, as Mikhail Epstein puts it, “a space in, or among, cultures which is open to all of them …. [which] frees us from any one culture.”9
I will finish this section by proposing three ways to conceive of the transcultural. (1) it can be seen as a complex, and/or heterogeneous space in which all other cultural categories are immersed, and out of which they are sometimes molded; (2) it can be seen as an aspect of everybody’s culture, and, potentially, as a culture all its own: a culture of people with across-groups-similar values and beliefs, and/or of people with complex, transcultural experiences and affiliations; (3) and, finally, it can be seen as a mode of interaction which works well among groups and people aware and accepting of cultural difference but not prepared to let that difference permanently divide them.
Transcultural Space. One of the ways of looking at this is to suggest that the cultural mixing, which has characterized our world for centuries, has had the effect of producing an enlarged cultural space above, between, and within all individual categories which participated in its production, and that this space now also precedes all new cultural categories. On one level, this space corresponds to what Mike Featherstone and others call global culture and Marshall McLuhan calls the global village. It can be seen as outlined by, among other things, the Gulf War, the intervention in Somalia, the Salman Rushdie affair, the global expansion of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and the Japanese car industry, as well as by global feminism, rock music, postcolonial criticism, cultural diversity, international contacts of scholars, and so forth. The transcultural in this sense also consists in transcultural occurrences on the local and micro levels, such as the combinations of cultural signs found in big cities, in individual literary, film, television and other texts, as well as in culturally complex individual subjectivities whose constitutive parts come from a variety of cultures without producing chaos or incoherence.
