The Utopia of Transculturality – the Cultural Ideas of Wolfgang Welsch

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch formulated the concept of transculturality to describe the changed state of the social and cultural reality of the late twentieth century. Welsh promotes this idea as a radical negation of "traditional" cultural theories based on the idea of ethnic, social, and territorial homogeneity, as well as on the "purity" and authenticity of individual national culture. According to Welsh, even the more modern concepts of multiculturalism and interculturality fail to avoid the main trap inscribed in older cultural theories: the "fatal" demarcation between one's own and another's. The theory of transculturality is constituted as a new cultural paradigm according to which cultures do not exist as separate entities but are created by intertwining and integrating the own and the foreign, which makes modern societies structurally heterogeneous and hybrid. Ideologically grounded in social and cultural plurality theories, transculturality causes a new confrontation with the issues of collective and individual identity and the question of its applicability in the humanities, art, and literature, to which it often refers. Like any new theoretical paradigm, transculturalism also enters the field of open theoretical discourse, where its actual scope and validity in describing and normalizing the cultural image of today are checked, which is one of the main goals of this paper.