8.1 Hybridity

Hybridity is a concept that has gained particular relevance for the field of postcolonial studies. Originally, the term was used in the biological discourse of 19^th century Europe where it had negative connotations, as it referred to the biological mixing of two different species considered to be “pure,” resulting in a genuinely different third “hybrid” species, characterized by a mixing of the features of the two original species. When transferred to evolutional and cultural theories, the term became charged with racism, as it was used to discriminate against people of mixed race.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s use of the term in his concept of heteroglossia and the carnevalesque contributed to the deconstruction of these negative connotations. Bakhtin, however, uses the term “hybridity” in a specific sense, relating to his own notion of heteroglossia inherent in language (cf. Section 4.1). He defines hybridity or, as he calls it, hybridization (emphasizing the active dimension of the concept), as follows: “What is a hybridization? It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor” (Bakhtin 1981: 358). Bakhtin refers here to the mixing of social languages within a single speech community in a historical dimension, rather than to a synchronic mixture of different languages and cultures. He emphasizes that inherent to every utterance are traces of different social voices and levels of meaning which can be employed consciously by the author of an utterance. But normally, the speaker or writer uses language in everyday interactions without being aware of the other voices he or she is using in the act of speaking or writing. Bakhtin labels the latter, subconscious, employment of multi-voicedness in utterances “organic hybridity” (Bakhtin 1981: 360). Although hybrid utterances are typically used unconsciously by speakers or writers, they still have, according to Bakhtin, crucial repercussions for the development of language and the creative potential inherent in language: “[U]nintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages. We may even say that language and languages change historically primarily by means of hybridization” (Bakhtin 1981: 358), because, “while it is true the mixture of linguistic world views in organic hybrids remains mute and opaque, such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new world views, with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world in words” (Bakhtin 1981: 360).

Thus, it is the hybrid form of language which drives change in cognition. In contrast to the subconscious organic hybridity, in which the mixture of voices merge and constitute new meanings or actions, consciously employed hybridity by ordinary language users (but more frequently by artists, especially novelists and poets, and L2 users who employ deliberate effort in the use of hybridization), is divisive, conflictual, and contradictory. “Intentional semantic hybrids are inevitably internally dialogic (as distinct from organic hybrids). Two points of view are not mixed, but set against each other dialogically” (Bakhtin 1981: 360). With the two notions of organic hybridity, tending toward the fusion of voices, and intentional hybridity, emphasizing conflictual elements of dialogue, Bakhtin applies the notion of hybridity to the concept of hybridity itself, which fuses voices while at the same time maintaining a degree of separation with the potential of one voice unmasking the other. In construing this theoretical figuration, Bakhtin deconstructs the concept of authoritative discourse which by definition must rely on a single voice; hybrid constructs, however, immediately undermine endeavors towards a single-voiced authority (cf. Young 1995: 22).

The postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha has taken up on the undermining influences of Bakhtin’s linguistic concept of intentional hybridity and transformed it “into an active moment of challenge and resistance against a dominant cultural power” (Young 1995: 23). Biological origin and ethnic characteristics are not relevant to cultural concepts; rather, the spatial metaphors of “place” and “displacement,” or even the “location of culture” (Bhabha 1994) take center stage. When cultures collide, for example, in colonialism, where the local culture is suppressed and dominated by the colonizing metropolitan culture, both cultures involved undergo subtle and sustained transformations by blending marginal spaces. Thus, the emphasis shifts from the center of cultural systems of meaning to their margins, to borderline zones and spaces “in-between” as the most relevant spheres where cultural production takes place. Consequently, Bhabha (1994) emphasizes the necessity,

Bhabha thus turns the concept of hybridity against concepts of multiculturalism: whereas multiculturalism assumes a diversity of language games, cultures, and societies, which co-exist without intersections, hybridity emphasizes precisely the existence of such flexible creolizing intersections which are fraught with difference and meaning-potential.⁷⁶

Bhabha (1994: 25; emphasis in the original) defines the “place of hybridity” as something “that is new, neither the one nor the other (...), a space that can accept and regulate the differential structure of the moment of intervention without rushing to produce a unity of the social antagonism or contradiction.” In this formulation of the hybrid place as being able to “accept and regulate the differential structure of the moment of intervention,” Bhabha designs the hybrid place as having the potential to harmonize and integrate differential structures, patterns, and categories of meaning, although he adds that this harmonizing impetus may only be achieved in the long run. However, in this passage Bhabha may be too optimistic as to the harmonizing potential of the hybrid place, in particular with regard to intercultural encounters, because efforts of harmonizing all too often mean eliminating differences, and thus integrating the Other into the familiar structures and patterns of construction, thereby robbing it of its authentic voice. Hybridity in this sense contains the danger of deconstructing and dissolving traditional categories of substance that are central to the collective memory of speech communities and for their construction of cultural identity.⁷⁷

However, what is evident from Bhabha’s passage above is that all cultural (self-)constructs and linguistically mediated (self-)concepts informing social and historical practices are ultimately negotiable, as they have their basis not in cultural diversity, but in cultural difference, which in turn has its origin in the ongoing and never-ending process of negotiation and re-inscription through the interpenetration of different, frequently contradictory, Discourses. Consequently, monolithic categories such as race, gender, and class have to be re-conceptualized, as they are no longer seen in the historical perspective of their constitution, but in their different discursive constructions which operate without hierarchies. In this context, hybridity does not simply mean the mixing of categories, but it is conceptualized as a situation of permanent translation of the different categories, their transgression and in-between space, as an “activity of displacement” (Rutherford 1990: 210).

Some researchers see the concept of hybridity as being “too often accompanied by a certain wide-eyed romantic fascination with what otherwise might be seen simply as the diversification that necessarily comes with the day-to-day evolution of a range of cultural phenomena and activities. Thus, it may be best to frame discussions of social and cultural forms in the global age in terms of ever-increasing diversification rather than hybridity” (Block 2012: 59). However, Block’s suggestion to replace the concept of hybridity by that of diversification or glocalization⁷⁸ implies the loss of important aspects of the concept of hybridity which is not captured by the proposed alternative concepts. For instance, hybridity has the potential to undermine the articulation of cultural differences from the margins and to deconstruct seemingly obvious and unambiguous categories like ethnicity, class, or gender.⁷⁹ In this sense, the notion of hybridity has a subversive potential for which it is important from which position, or with what voice, one speaks and acts. This is particularly relevant for displaced persons, immigrants and subalterns, but also for artists, intellectuals, and advanced L2 learners who constantly move in a cosmopolitan manner between cultures and, ideally, turn their multifaceted “belonging” to different cultures and Discourses into creative endeavors of enunciation (cf. Chapter 10). Therefore, the hybrid status of the inter and the liminality of their positions are responsible for their creative and innovative endeavors, as they have access to different systems of conceptualization, and are able to blend spaces between, or inter, cultures in a productive manner. Hybridization, in this sense, is neither an object nor a product of analysis, but a constantly ongoing process of articulation and construction. Instead of reducing differences to their origins, it is necessary to recognize them in their conditions of inequality and, from this basis, constantly renegotiate them anew. Clearly, differences are not taxonomic but interactive so that they have the potential to overcome the bipolar system of thinking and form genuinely new, yet highly dynamic, foundations for construction.

8.2 The third space

The process of hybridization implies an exploration of a metaphorical third space, a threshold space, blended from blends of other spaces, located in a continuum between determinations of essence and identity. Hybridization can be seen as the activation of the third space as a method of interpretation that is directed against simplifying dichotomies and binary categorizations. This, however, does not imply a dissolution or melting away of two existing firm spaces, poles, or positions, as transculturalists would make us believe, but emphasizes the existence of already presupposed mixed and hybrid spaces as the starting point for analysis. Hybridity is the pre-existing third space of a simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous which forms the basis of the continuous emergence of further hybrid third spaces, as Bhabha suggests: “But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge” (Bhabha in Rutherford 1990: 211). This implies that one and the same sign has to be constantly re-interpreted and reconfigured anew, from different subject positions and in different spaces so that novel knowledge can emerge. It also implies that boundaries are necessary, although these imply the kind of essentialism that postmodernism wishes to overcome. However, boundaries are constructed in the subjective mind (with the aid of cultural patterns and social structures); it is ultimately the subjects who “are all left with the responsibility for deciding where to try to draw what circles with whom, and around what” (Hollinger 1995: 172, cited in Kumaravadivelu 2008: 127). These boundaries and notions of essentialism are not durable and determinative, but fleeting and only momentarily valid for the individual, as they are constantly de- and reconstructed by subjective engagement in the process of blending spaces through intersubjective interaction.

One of the most promising potentials of a hybrid concept of culture, identity, language, and learning which operates with the notion of third spaces lies in the field of intercultural relations. This is one of the principal terrains of hybrid spaces, contact zones, and intersections for negotiation of difference in order to elicit unknown and subconscious layers of culture, society, and identity which would otherwise remain tacit and unexplored; this is true not only with regard to the Other, but also to the initially dominant L1 cultural and subjective constructs. However, this presupposes that hybrid third spaces are not conceptualized purely as spaces of mixing two or more influences on a level playing field; there are differences in conceptual power in intercultural contacts. For example, at least in the initial stages of L2 learning, the L1-related concepts, values, and norms exert a much more powerful influence on thought and (inter-)action than those of the L2 or those of the emerging third spaces. This inequality, however, is one of the driving forces of the creative potential of third spaces: difference and conflict serve as genuine sources and processes of translation that have to be evaluated with respect to the constitution of a particular dynamic third space. These processes can be an important factor in the transposition of subjective, but also of social spaces. In processes of intersubjective communication, the two places (“You” and “I”) are mobilized to produce meaning in a passage through a third space which “constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Bhabba 1994: 37). Thus, the third space highlights the openness, dynamism, and non-essentialism of culture which is susceptible to interpretation and invocation in different contexts by individuals of different social and cultural backgrounds, and therefore it is often ambivalent and contradictory.

The second dimension of the concept of third spaces is located, not on the conceptual level, but on the spatial level of contact, of hybridity, of in-betweenness, and on the overlap of borderline zones and borderline situations. This dimension refers to a space of negotiation within and between cultures in which the borderlines are being destabilized, for instance, in the case of constructs such as native and foreign, Other and self. It results in a genuinely blended third space which is no longer reducible to the two (or more) original references contributing to the constitution of the space in-between which is spread out and shared between the informing sources (cf. Section 4.7). It may be important to emphasize the concept of the third space as a useful metaphor here, because there are, of course, far more complex influences at work than the triadization model would imply.

The emphasis on space in postmodern thought is a result of an epistemological loss of the power of analytic categories of time, traditionally emphasizing diachronic changes, and the simultaneous rise of the category of space, emphasizing the synchronic level of systemic development and change. Thus, one can even speak of a “spatial turn” in cultural studies (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2006: 284-328). Space in this context is understood as a social construct rather than as a discursive problem; it does not refer to something like territoriality or a stock of traditions, but rather to the collective production of spaces as a multilayered (and occasionally contradictory) social process, to a specific social and psychological location of cultural practices, to a dynamic of social relations which implies the dynamism and fragility of space. In postmodernism, “There are no fixed boundaries and no fortress walls; theories and themes can be drawn in from disciplines and may flock back in a transformed state to influence thinking there” (Baldwin et al. 2004:41). The spatial turn brings with it its own vocabulary of cultural analysis, for instance, terms such as marginality, fringe, mapping, border, location, deterritorialization, center, and periphery, all of which suggest a synchronic conceptualization and theorizing of different analogous levels and dimensions: the individual and the social, the local and the global, the concrete and the imagined, practice and representation. These categories are not pure and atomistic but fused and blended.

The same is true for cultures which, as a matter of principle, do not exist in isolation from one another in a pure form: “Other cultures are not a mute external fact but shape its self-definition, and constitute a silent and unacknowledged presence within it” (Parekh 2006: 163). Modern multicultural societies have migrants from other countries and cultures living in their midst who contribute to the development of new spaces in the host cultures. This can be seen in many fields of ordinary life, for example, at its most basic level in eating habits where (a toned-down version of) Indian curry has surpassed traditional fish & chips as the favorite English dish, and Turkish Döner Kebab is challenging Bratwurst and Currywurst as the most-consumed fast food in Germany. On a more complex level, someone of Indian descent living in Britain, or someone of Turkish descent living in Germany, has to negotiate identities located between the poles of Indian/Turkish, and British /German cultures and traditions. These negotiations can further be broken down into regional, professional, social, religious, ascribed, role-dependent, and many other strands of identity, all to a large extent subjectively blended and to some extent socioculturally ascribed (cf. Chapter 6). They may include apparently irreconcilable traditions such as arranged marriage in certain Asian cultures (see Section 10.2, Principle 8), or female genital mutilation which is practiced in many countries in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Southeast Asia. These traditions pose a challenge for liberal multicultural societies because they deny the individual the right of self-determination (cf. Bredella 2012: 124-140). But even these collective traditions are open to change through subjective negotiation of culturally induced differences by people living in a multicultural society because “they integrate, reflect upon, and modify their own cultural heritage and that of other people with whom they come into contact. Human identity is created, as Taylor puts it, dialogically, including our actual dialogues with others” (Gutmann 1994: 7, cited in Bredella 2012: 127; emphasis in the original). Thus it is the intercultural third space which provides the potential for overcoming cultural differences, both subjectively and collectively.

The third space in interculturality, in that sense, does not simply mean interaction between cultures and their proponents in the sense of exchanging the respective cultural specificities. Instead, it aims to create an intermediary field that is constituted subjectively (and possibly collectively) as a field of genuinely new knowledge, originating from the margins of the cultures involved. Only from this basis can the reciprocal identification of difference be approached, that is, on the basis of a genuine third space, located in a continuum in-between cultures. This space is always a subjective blend or a subjectively adapted bricolage of different aspects of these categories which opens up new perspectives on constructs and configurations without annihilating them in the monoculturally informed process of understanding, as is characteristic of acculturating translations which tend to integrate the differential, the foreign, into the familiar cultural and conceptual categories, thereby destroying it in its originality and authenticity. This is because the intercultural third space itself is a product of interwoven discursive cultural constructs. It is already dynamically located between cultures and offers a hybrid, basically non-repressive and fundamentally open inter as the foundation of interpretation and construction.

However, this does not mean that the third space between cultures is beyond potential criticism, or that it exists in a political, ethical, or moral vacuum. It can still be subjected to such critical analyses because it is embedded in intersections of the different D/discourses of the cultures involved, which ultimately form a third space on a discursive level. This is what Bhabha (1994: 25; cf. above) means when he says that the third space “is neither the one nor the other,” or when the intercultural philosopher Ram A. Mall (1998: 57) defines the third space as being “orthaft, jedoch ortlos” [apparently located but without conventional location] (my translation, A.W.). From this fragmented third space, Mall argues, a critical-reflexive distance without prejudices is facilitated for both the native and the foreign cultures and conceptualizations (cf. Mall 1993: 9).⁸⁰ This line of argument takes the third space to be a genuinely new territory of construction which is somewhat suspended between the different cultures, languages, and Discourses contributing to their fragmented existence. These new spaces of construal facilitate categories and norms of construction, including criticism, just as their underlying contributory cultures do, so that they can be criticized, while simultaneously forming the new foundations for critique. However, due to their dynamism, fragmentation, and inessentiality, they may be more difficult to pin down, so they offer less apparent potential for critique than modernist constructs of cultures.

Understanding other languages and cultures in a non-distorting, or non-imperialistic manner, then, is only possible on the basis of this dynamic third space. If the categories for construction, action, perception, and understanding are exclusively the ones used by the first language and culture, the Other will be appropriated in order to fit these categories; otherwise it would remain alien (cf. Gadamer 1975: 15). Therefore, the only chance of understanding the other culture (without distorting or even destroying it in the process of appropriation) lies within the interpenetration and transposition of these principally monocultural categories. It implies that the subjective position of comprehension is now dislocated from the dominant L1 categories and relocated within the shifting bases of the third space; the person or institution wanting to understand or act intersubjectively must have developed this hybrid space between the languages and cultures concerned, which transcends the basis for understanding provided by familiar L1 and unfamiliar L2 categories alike, even if the subject may not be consciously aware of this process. However, it is very difficult to achieve a genuine intercultural third space, as it presupposes comprehensive knowledge of and competence in both the first and the other language and culture, which can in turn only be acquired in the course of a long and arduous learning process with deliberate effort and intention, as well as heightened engagement and awareness,⁸¹ be it in the institutional L2 classroom or by living and acting within the second language community. During this process of intensively learning the second language and its underlying cultural patterns, the subject’s native categories of understanding and construction will become more relative in a reciprocal process of understanding, deconstruction, and reconstruction, hence heightening the comprehension of linguistic, social, and cultural patterns in their relativity and negotiability.

An understanding of the other culture and its configurations in its totality is, of course, impossible to achieve for any person, just as it is also impossible to completely understand the native culture in all its manifestations and processes, simply because culture is not (and cannot be) stored anywhere in its totality (cf. Kronenfeld 2002: 430). Culture is a highly dynamic and multilayered construct, with some layers operating beyond the level of consciousness (tacit knowledge, cf. Chapter 7). Thus, attempts to understand aspects of another culture are structured in such a way that they are triggered by specific items, experiences, or observations. From this starting point, the process of exchange and understanding is aimed at deeper layers of cultural patterns in order to construct a reciprocal rule that can connect the previously known patterns to the new configuration at which the cognitive efforts are directed. In this fashion, the particular aspects of the other cultural concepts and configurations, although cognitively grasped, still maintain their authentic right in opposition to comparable internalized native categories, albeit in an attenuated manner (as they are understood on the basis of a third place located on a continuum between the cultures). The German philosopher Waldenfels (1997: 53) comments: “Ohne dieses Zwischen gäbe es keine Intersubjektivität und Interkulturalität, die ihren Namen verdient. Es bliebe bei der bloßen Erweiterung oder Vervielfältigung des Eigenen, das Fremde ware immer schon zum Schweigen gebracht” [Without this space ‘in-between’ there would be no any intersubjectivity and interculturality deserving of the name. There would be only the expansion and duplication of the native categories, the Other would always have already been silenced] (my translation, A.W.).

Therefore, the hybrid space of the inter of dynamic conceptions has to be understood as the primary location for the collective and individual construction of meaning. The inter not only refers to intercultural categories, but also to all intracultural and intersubjective levels of society, Discourse, and culture. The consciousness of the subject, for example, is symbolically constituted by the intersection and interweaving of languages, conceptualizations, values, orders, D/discourses, and systems. Perception, emotion, motivation, and mental processes rely fundamentally on the interplay of these categories when they are triggered by the given circumstances (cf. Chapter 2). Third places, therefore, are not only located at the intersection of different cultures, but are also characteristic of the inner differentiation of any given culture, society, and subject (cf. Chapters 2-7). Bhabha (1994: 36) highlights this close dependence of the subjective human mind on the sociocultural and linguistic context, and emphasizes the difference inherent to language as the crucial element in the production of meaning:

Just as language does not allow for the production of fixed and unambiguous meaning, the subject cannot speak with one unambiguous voice in his or her own original words (cf. Section 4.1). It is the third space in its quality as a mobilization of the subjective voice and the social, yet momentarily subjectively instrumentalized tool of language in a “spatial relation within the schemata and strategies of discourse” (Bhabha 1994: 36) which allows for intersubjective (and intrasubjective) interaction, albeit at the cost of an ambivalence of meaning, since neither is one or the other.

Claire Kramsch (2009a: 199-201) has recently suggested replacing the spatial metaphor of space or place in intercultural L2 learning with the notion of “symbolic competence.” She argues that the metaphor of third place is too static to capture the relational state of mind operating between languages (cf. Kramsch 2009a: 200) and is also lacking a “discourse dimension” (Kramsch 2012: 17). Reframing the notion of a third place as symbolic competence has the potential to more appropriately capture “the symbolic value of symbolic forms and the different cultural memories evoked by different symbolic systems” (Kramsch 2009a: 201), as well as emphasizing the semiotic character of mediating L2 and L1 constructs by way of looking “both at and through language” (Kramsch 2009a: 201; emphasis in the original). While Kramsch’s suggestion is certainly valid, in particular for highlighting the symbolic mediation of concepts pertaining to self, Other, and world, the same elements of L2 learning can be captured in the metaphors of space and place, if one emphasizes exactly the categories of symbolic mediation, dynamism, blending, hybridity, embodiment, subjectivity, and translation so that the intercultural space cannot be misunderstood as being static and essential. The use of the spatial metaphor in intercultural L2 learning has the advantage of mapping out the elements of constant blending and translating linguistic and sociocultural frames in a way that fosters an easy yet nuanced understanding of these complex processes (cf. Chapter 10).

Intercultural spaces can be seen as a doubling of intracultural spaces “in-between”: the individual already occupies intra-cultural dynamic spaces “in-between” different linguistic signs, cultural patterns, norms of action, dominant Discourses, and spaces for subjective dispositions of his or her first culture and society. By learning a second language, these intracultural spaces are increasingly put into a new perspective through direct or mediated encounters with different social structures, cultural patterns, categories, conceptualizations, and conventions. This process opens up a new dimension of intercultural construction and blending of spaces, located on a continuum between the conceptualizations, values, and norms of discourses of the two (or more) cultures involved. This new dimension fundamentally transforms subjective meaning and categories of construction based solely on the native linguistic and cultural system; it enables blended, oscillating, and translational constructions of new meaning by engaging with differential linguistic signs, social conventions, and cultural patterns.

8.3 Translating cultures

The activities and processes of translating cultural patterns, constructs, and processes are at the heart of the mobilization of intercultural third spaces. They are also at the heart of L2 acquisition, because the other linguistic items and sociocultural constructs will in the mind of the L2 learner, at least at the initial and intermediate levels of L2 learning, be translated into the familiar constructs of the native language and socioculture. However, in the process of L2 learning, the subjective position of the L2 learner drifts away from the L1-mediated constructs and towards a position between the languages and sociocultures involved, thus opening up intercultural spaces as new bases for construction.

The translational turn in cultural studies (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2006: 238-283) originated from the insight that in a world of increasing cross-cultural contact and multicultural societies, of reciprocal dependencies and global networks, mutual understanding cannot be achieved by linguistic and textual translations alone; these have to be complemented and expanded by cultural inter- and intrasemiotic systems, including Discourses, genres, schemata, and frames (cf. Chapter 3). The metaphor of translating cultures relies to a certain extent on the metaphor of culture as text (cf. Section 7.2); the assumption is that, since texts can be translated from one language into another, cultural aspects also have to be translatable from one culture into another. However, culture is a much broader concept than text (or language), and therefore this kind of translation must be much more inclusive.

In the wake of the “writing-culture debate” (cf. Section 7.2) in ethnography which treated the process of depicting other cultures itself as its object of analysis, it became evident that an authentic translation of other cultural patterns, processes, and categories into the familiar native cultural concepts was all but impossible; there would always be distortions and incompatibilities as to the appropriate translation of culture-specific contextual and life-world (lebensweltliche) elements. This is particularly true of the sphere of tacit cultural knowledge which guides social action to a considerable degree (cf. Chapter 7). But it is also true of connotations and affective elements which, for example, may be indicated in the gender of inanimate nouns in languages making this kind of distinction, for instance, in the majority of European languages, such as French, German, Spanish, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Czech, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Greek. One of the best-known poems by the German writer Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), entitled “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam” [A Pine Tree Stands Lonesome] (Heine 1827: 137), plays with the tension between the lonely male pine tree (der Fichtenbaum) who is covered in ice and snow in northern Europe and is dreaming of an exotic palm tree, which in German is female (die Palme), located in the hot and mysterious orient. This tension between the sexes cannot be captured in the English translation, as the English language does not provide for genders. The English translation is thus confined to using the bland “the” or “it” instead, completely missing out on a central strand of meaning of the poem. Jakobson (2000) provides many more examples for this process; one of them is the following: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists: he did not realize that ‘sin’ is feminine in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (rpex)” (Jakobson 2000: 142; emphasis in the original). The grammatical gender has implications for the memorization of nouns, as they have to be remembered as gendered items for appropriate linguistic use. But gender also has implications for the subjective and collective imagination and fantasy, as Jakobson has shown. Deutscher (2011) points out the enriching implications of gendered nouns in language for workings of the mind: “My mind may be weighed down by an arbitrary and illogical set of associations, but my world has so much to it that you [English speakers] miss out on, because the landscape of my [gendered] language [Hebrew] is so much more fertile than your arid desert of ‘it’s’” (Deutscher 2011: 215). Clearly, distinctions like these are significant for translation and point to the necessity of their presence the cultural context in translation, where relevant.⁸²

In the interpretative approach to reading culture, an authentic reading without noticeable mistranslations could only occur from within a culture which provides the common frame for understanding. Hence, the metaphor of “translating cultures” means to a large extent construing (or “othering”) cultures on the basis of the assumed authority of translation. However, translation is always influenced by socioculturally generated categories and conventions of construction (e.g., frames, schemata), as well as by the conscious deployment of certain narrative strategies by the translator. It is impossible to achieve a direct one-dimensional translation of constructs and D/discourses from one cultural context to another, as the inherent conceptualizations and frames, the social practices, habitus, and activities of members of different cultural communities are different.⁸³ This was astutely observed by Walter Benjamin when he posits that: “While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. For it signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien” (Benjamin 2000: 19). Benjamin compares the task of the translator here to the work of a poet by creating the image of the former’s work as rich (royal) and encompassing (ample), comprehensive yet enveloping (albeit not in the same close manner than the original relation between language and content). Thus, there only can be an allegorical form of transferring, depicting, and mediating between cultural elements in which the translator applies his or her own preferences and internalized cultural patterns. Hence, the process of translating cultures, including the translation of other ways of thinking and construing, has to be understood as fundamentally inseparable from a cultural framework of social action. Consequently, the activity of translating cultures is not only confined to a semantic level, but refers to all aspects of liminal spaces in the context of intercultural discourse and dialogue.

Translation operates in the intercultural third space and tries, first of all, to reflect from that location the processes of constituting difference before trying to negotiate these differences; this operation must also include the status and motivations of the translator as a cultural subject. Cultures, then, cannot be understood as mere objects of translation but as constellations of conflict, difference, dynamism, and mixing of influences which also includes the position of the translator. His or her position in this process cannot be that of a detached observer, constructing his or her discourse from a principal distance to what he or she describes and translates, since he or she is clearly culturally situated. Rather, his or her discursive positionings have to engage in the discursive translation process, thus becoming part of it. In the translation process, the translator’s basic categories of interpretation and construction change, as do his or her constructs of subjective and professional identity. Translations do not imply the confrontation of cultural norms, values, and constructs, but rather dialogue and interaction, thus elevating reciprocal translations (as processes of negotiation) to constitutive acts for emerging identities and (inter-)actions. By becoming part of the translation process itself, the translator has to develop a certain cognitive distance from both the content of the translation and the activity of translating in order to consciously reflect on his or her position within that process, thereby avoiding any essentialist traps which might lead to inappropriate translation.

But even if the translator has an excellent knowledge of the languages and cultures involved, he or she still makes judgments as to the appropriate translation of lexical items, concepts, and configurations and their cultural context, which necessarily distort the translation semantically from the source text. Making these judgments is an integral part of the translation process, as the cultural audiences of source and translated texts are not the same; therefore, implications and insinuations which can be taken for granted as easily understood by one cultural audience might go completely unnoticed by the audience receiving the translation. It is part of the task of the translator to mediate, minimize and/or explain these interferences. However, in the translation process, the original text should not be caused to disappear by over-adapting and absorbing it completely into the target language and its culture. Were this the case, it would lose its authenticity and otherness, and hence lose its important quality of alienating the familiar. The translator has to recognize that acts of cultural translation require a language which is ambivalent, as it is positioned on the borderline of different systems. The translator has many choices open to her or him to defuse such problems of translation: (1) the original text can be completely absorbed into the target language and culture (and thus disappear); (2) it can be conceptually construed into a dynamic third space located between the cultures, or (3) it can be left largely in the source culture domain, as Walter Benjamin (2000) suggests, albeit at the risk of being met with non-understanding, misunderstanding or, worst of all, apathy by the potential recipient. The renowned translator Michael Hofmann (1999) describes the complex problems and inherent frustrations of producing a comprehensive English translation of a foreign text in its sociocultural context: “I want to give an English readership the smell, the fingertip sense, the colour, the quiddity, the specific experience of another place. To show how people travel, how they speak, what they wear, what their history is, their geography, their politics. I want the English reader to get inside their skin” (Hofmann 1999: 73). Hofmann goes on to say that this approach is doomed with certain audiences because, “Neither the English, nor the Americans like to be transported in that way” (Hofmann 1999: 73). In taking the expectations and preferences of the readership into account, translations produced for an American or English audience may be of a different, more leveling quality than translations into other languages. Non-English speaking audiences, by contrast, are typically much more open to these kinds of resistant translations because of the dominance of Anglo-American cultural products (including languages), in particular Hollywood movies and (usually subtitled) TV-series.⁸⁴ However, only a translation that recognizes the foreign by interrupting and breaking the stream of familiar language can, at least for a moment, interrupt or even de-center the taken-for-granted familiarities of the monolingual recipient.

Lefevere (1999: 76) introduces the concepts of “conceptual grid” and “textual grid” in order to capture some of the extralinguistic contexts of translations. Both grids are intertwined and have been internalized during the processes of socialization. Hence, the phrases Once upon a time or I raise my glass each trigger a certain grid (or frame) and expectation in the reader or listener who has been socialized into a Western society which is different from, for example, a text announcing the arrival of an airplane. Lefevere (1999) concludes that, “Problems in translating are caused at least as much by discrepancies in textual and conceptual grids as by discrepancies in languages,” and that “grids, in their interplay, may well determine how reality is constructed for the reader, not just of the translation, but also of the original” (Lefevere 1999: 77). With this remark, Lefevere refers to the fact that translation is at the heart of human cognition, considering that voluntary thought operates with symbols to which meaning is assigned in an arbitrary manner. Thus, language is already a translation from non-linguistic signs (e.g., objects in the material and social worlds) to linguistic signs and concepts. In addition, considering Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia and polyphony, social language is already a translation of another text, as Octavio Paz explicates: “Each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text. No text can be completely original because language itself, in its very essence, is already a translation – first from the nonverbal world, and then, because each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase” (Paz 1992: 154).

If one expands Paz’ notion of text to all cultural and social phenomena, including textual and conceptual grids, the importance of translation becomes obvious. This has also consequences for the definition of the term “translation” since it relates not only to translating bits and elements from one grid to another in an “objective” and detached fashion, but also to the individual processes of subjectively positioning oneself between different Discourses, which has repercussions for the construction of a personal identity (cf. Chapter 6). Thus, translational processes lie at the heart of the postmodern hybrid personality, as they do for hybrid societies and cultures.

An important contribution to cultural translation studies has been made by Mary Louise Pratt who introduces the concept of “transculturation,” borrowed from the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz who used it to overcome the dichotomy of “acculturation” and “deculturation” (Pratt 1992: 228) in colonial studies. Acculturation means the acquisition and integration of other cultural beliefs and practices into one’s own cognitive and behavioral structures, whereas deculturation refers to the parallel process of erasing one’s traditional cultural traits. In ethnography, the term transculturation refers to the role of peripheral or subordinate groups in selecting and reconfiguring the materials transferred to them from a metropolitan or dominant group, thus creating new cultural phenomena (neo-culturation). The concept of transculturation also has relevance for L2 learning, because the learner (both as subject and as group-member) also selects and reconfigures materials, values, and norms and transfers them to his or her particular needs at a particular phase in the L2 acquisition process. The experience of uprooting oneself from one’s first cultural milieu and erasing one’s traditional cultural traits are elements that can affect L2 learners as members of minority cultures prior to, but also during the process of learning a L2. The interculturally competent teacher should make these experiences productive for the intercultural L2 classroom, if they can be verbalized and if the individual L2 learner is comfortable with bringing his or her experiences into the L2 classroom. The notion of transculturation can be relevant for the L2 classroom in this regard; however, these experiences of some L2 learners are not the main focus of the L2 classroom which tries to facilitate meaningful intercultural experiences of L2 learners in terms of negotiating third places between the dominant L1-related constructs and those of the L2; hence the L2 classroom tends to be intercultural rather than transcultural.

Pratt, however, transfers the concept of transculturation to travel writing, and introduces other concepts that may be of relevance for both intercultural communication and translation. The term contact zone refers to one of these concepts. Pratt defines contact zones as, “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (Pratt 1992: 4). She subsequently narrows down this definition of contact zone with the following specification as, “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992: 6). Thus, the term contact zone emphasizes the asymmetry of the spaces of encounter between cultures, or more precisely, members of different cultures. Pratt highlights not only the asymmetry between dominant and subordinate cultures and conflictual situations, but also the fact that the modern ethnographic translator is no longer a member of the dominant culture who tries to translate the subordinate culture into categories of the metropolitan culture: he or she is now a cultural hybrid with roots in both cultures. However, in the texts produced by the colonized (or by hybrids), the conceptual power of representation continues to lie with the metropolitan cultures and languages, as they dominate international discourse (cf. Phillipson 1992).

Translation opens up intercultural spaces which are neither completely alien nor completely familiar; they contain specific cultural and linguistic layers, creating cultural and linguistic spaces “in-between,” or third spaces which also require constructive efforts on the part of the recipient. Bhabha emphasizes the unique creative potential of the translational liminal space by suggesting that,

Thus, according to Bhabha, monocultural spaces are much too reliant on themselves, to the extent that they have lost the power of fundamental cultural critique. This task has been transferred to liminal third spaces which have access to alternative conceptualizations, cultural patterns, and frames. With this creative potential, they can reveal tacit knowledge and introduce new knowledge into private and public spaces and Discourses. When the third space in-between essences, cultures, and people is occupied by a person, it does not leave subjectivity unaffected; it has transforming effects on the subject’s potential to understand, construct, and act. Therefore, even translation of the familiar and the unfamiliar within a given culture is a creative process of constituting meaning for both the subject and the community, thus dissolving and overcoming essentialist and binary concepts.

The traditional (i.e., linguistically based) concept of translation and its recent elevation to a “turn” in the humanities (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2006: 238-283) mainly relates to the encounter of two (or more) languages and cultures. In order to gain new insights into the constellation of encounters between cultures, including in a historical dimension, the notion of interculturality can be conceptualized as a complex process of ongoing cultural translations. It is also neither necessary nor (from the subjective point of view) desirable, that people who have many international contacts (be it in business, sport, leisure, academia, etc.) embark on the long and arduous process of learning every relevant foreign language and its cultural context, including constructing subjective third places for themselves between the cultures concerned. While on the one hand global icons are being developed in order to enhance the global circulation of information and goods, on the other hand the process of globalization has elevated English as the hegemonic language of the world with the inherent forces of cultural leveling (cf. Philippson 1992; Kumaravadivelu 2008). This process has led many people in predominantly English-speaking countries (such as Great Britain, the U.S., Ireland) to believe that learning a L2 is not necessary, since apparently English is enough to get on in the world. This attitude, however, overlooks the linguistically, conceptually, and (inter-)culturally enriching traits of L2 acquisition. These two developments of global icons and English as the dominant language, together with ongoing attempts to articulate differences in the increasingly globalized world community, have contributed to the rise of the “translational turn,” extending translation into an ethnologically enriched category of the social sciences and an important cultural technique.

In contrast to Samuel Huntington’s (1996) pessimistic assumption that linguistic and cultural untranslatability will ultimately result in a “clash of civilizations,” the translational turn suggests that all elements of cultures and languages are translatable, thus making cultural differences principally understandable and therefore negotiable (cf. Chapter 9). Huntington’s notion of civilizations or cultures is outdated, in that he assumes a rigidity and essentialism that cannot capture the frictions, dynamics, and flexibility of culture or, to use his terminology, “civilization.” Semantic primes could be used in order to overcome culture-specific conceptualizations or configurations and to reduce even complex linguistic or cultural constructs to relatively simple ideas that are translatable between languages and cultures. Semantic primes are the underlying basic conceptualizations for all human languages, based on the assumption that all human languages share the same propensity to encode the same basic set of concepts in words (cf. Wierzbicka 1996). Semantic primes are “the smallest set of basic concepts in terms of which all other words and concepts can be explicated; literally, ‘the simplest lexis of paraphrase and explanation’” (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2007: 107), arrived at by the mechanism of reductive paraphrase. There are about 60 semantic primes (or semantic primitives) that have been identified as the universal basic building-blocks of meaning (cf. Goddard 2002; Dirven and Verspoor 1998: 142; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2007: 107). These semantic primes consist of basic semantic elements in the categories of substantives, determining elements, experiencing verbs, actions and processes, existence and possession, quantifiers, life and death, evaluation and description, spatial concepts, temporal concepts, relational elements and logical elements (Dirven and Verspoor 1998: 143). For example, the semantic primes for the category of “actions, events and movement” are just the verbs “do, happen, move” (Goddard 2002: 14). As such, semantic primes have the potential to dissolve essential concepts of language and culture like the ones Huntington implies, and at the same time create a cross-cultural platform for understanding.⁸⁵ This is the reason why Goddard and Wierzbicka (2007: 105) suggest semantic primes should become “core vocabulary in the L2 classroom.” Although semantic primes can provide access to the meaning system of other cultures, semantic primes are semantically reduced to such an extent that much of the culturally charged meaning has been lost. This sort of reductive paraphrase and translation does not have the potential to broaden cultural conflicts to the extent of non-existence; on the contrary, diversification is an integral part of translation so that in all contacts, transpositions, mixings, and translations the translator and the critical recipient are aware of the instances of mediation in order to disrupt the all too smooth processes of translation and advance to the level of cultural differences.

The goal of translation is not to resolve existing differences into a new harmonized totality, but to create another locus of inscription and intervention: “Differences in culture and power are constituted through the social conditions of enunciation: the temporal caesura, which is also the historically transformative moment, when a lagged space opens up in-between the intersubjective ‘reality of signs... deprived of subjectivity’ and the historical development of the subject in the order of social symbols” (Bhabha 1994: 242; emphasis in the original). Translation thus becomes a specific interventional space of action located within, across, and between cultures which are asymmetric due to the “temporal caesura,” that is, the contact zone of dominating and dominated cultures (e.g., in colonialism). However, culture is not a translatable textual entity since it is itself constituted in continuous processes of constant translation of the different unequal conditions of power within a specific cultural community in a socio-historical dimension. Translating culture, then, can only refer to translating elements of a culture in specific contexts, putting them into a specific relation to comparable configurations of the other culture through the dynamic third space suspended between them. The process of translating culture on an intercultural level, therefore, cannot be content with translating the sphere of representation of signs and symbols; it must also include the contextual social and cultural spheres and try to translate the role of the institutional infrastructure and the economic and political frameworks of Discourse. Ideally, it would also include an interpretive effort, focused on the matrix of conceptualizations and actions, that arises from the experience of everyday living within the other society and culture (Lebenswelt), as favored by the interpretive approach of ethnography (cf. Chapter 7). In addition, the translation process also has to consider the conditions of medial structures of translation as the preconditions for including deep structures of cultural and intercultural processes.

One of the difficulties of cultural translation is the fact that the categories used for trans-cultural comparison (e.g., time, history, society, individual, power, work, action, D/discourse, culture, development, modernity, and language) are neither stable entities nor do they have the same value and meaning across cultures. A critical theory of translation, therefore, has to make productive the consciousness of the instability of such categories in the sense of interaction, exchange, and reciprocity, but has also to recognize the limits of translation, as sometimes certain configurations are not fully translatable between cultures, for instance, culturally highly charged poetry such as Japanese Haiku (cf. Krusche 1984; cf. Section 4.3). Translation in this sense is a creative re-interpretation of cultural phenomena in the process of transfer between socioculturally constituted positions, thus destabilizing taken-for-granted interpretations:

However, such a translational approach of destabilizing cultural identity runs the risk of provoking a closure of the intercultural third space for certain individuals. For example, Western societies have lost their previously-held self-assured conception of themselves as harbingers of progress, wealth, and happiness in a globalized world. Backlash phenomena such as ethnicity, hostility towards foreigners, and religious fundamentalism, can be interpreted as indicative of ignorant and helpless attempts by those who feel threatened by the cultural presence of others. Consequently, they subconsciously turn away from the dynamic, ambivalent, heteroglot, and hybrid third space and return to the assumed safeties of essentialist vocabularies, even if these are politically charged, for example, the dehumanizing vocabularies of racism. The perceived threats to the assumed safeties of the monolingual and monocultural bases of construction, which have the potential to unsettle subjective constructs of personal and social identity, can at times be translated into xenophobic political action. This lays bare the fact that concepts of cultural translation, hybridity, and third spaces must be cognizant of the potential threat of intellectualizing existing social practices which are characterized on the ground by more violence and ugliness in certain sections of society than many of us would concede. Therefore, it is important that the process of translation includes a fundamental self-reflexive attitude which continuously positions the subject as a translator within the relevant complex network of existing linguistic, cultural, and social contexts. It is equally important that the intercultural third places are consciously and deliberately developed by engaged and dedicated L2 learners at their own pace; this development occurs on the subjective level, therefore it cannot be enforced or imposed by others, least of all by the L2 teacher.

8.4 Intercultural understanding

The notion of intercultural understanding has become politicized in recent times, in that it has come to be seen as a primary objective for the peaceful coexistence of the people of this world. However, this kind of understanding the Other cannot be achieved in a meaningful manner without accessing the Other’s language and underlying cultural patterns for the construction of meaning. In a narrower sense, it can also mean the comprehension of the Other’s communicative system in order to pursue one’s own objectives; an example of this are the frantic efforts of Western secret services to recruit people skilled in foreign languages, in particular Arabic, in the wake of the complete failure of the US secret services to anticipate the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001. These definitive and broad goals of intercultural understanding were summarized, long before 2001, in the following dramatic statement:

Although preventing nuclear annihilations is, of course, an important objective of intercultural understanding in the broadest sense, it does not feature highly on the agenda of second language learning. In this narrower context, the notion of intercultural understanding mainly refers to gaining access to the other’s linguistic system and, through it, to the other’s Lebenswelt. Inherent in the process of learning a second language are the processes of identity-transformation, change of attitudes, increased knowledge of other social groups and their practices, skills of interpreting and interacting, and skills of discovery (cf. Byram 2008:163). These are essential skills and competences for people acting in multicultural settings, as the English Department for Education and Skills (DfES) posited in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center: “In the knowledge society of the 21^st century, language competence and intercultural understanding are not optional extras, they are an essential part of being a citizen” (DfES 2002: 5, cited in Starkey 2010: 86). The L2 is thus not only the object of learning as an isolated sign system, but at the same both the medium of communication and a set of historically evolved cultural practices, i.e., a system of communication that allows for interpsychological and intrapsychological constructions of a sociocultural order which helps people use such constructs for constitutive social acts.

Like culture, the notion of understanding is a highly complex and contested one. Basically, there are three paradigms of understanding, namely the universal (logocentric), the relativistic (ethnocentric), and the subjective (egocentric) approaches (cf. Witte and Harden 2000: 7-24). The point of departure for the universal school is the assumed universality of the human experience: the other and I share a common physical world, namely planet Earth. Therefore, all humans must have the same basic faculties and devices for perception and understanding. The linguist Noam Chomsky (1965) goes a step further by arguing that humans are innately equipped with a specific “Language Acquisition Device,” a mechanism endowing children with the capacity to derive the syntactic structure and rules of their native language rapidly and accurately from the impoverished input provided by adults (e.g., baby talk, motherese, parentese, cf. Chapter 2). Chomsky believes that all languages share certain formal similarities, leading him to suggest that there has to be a universal grammar whose properties are shared by all human languages. Consequently, his pupil Steven Pinker, building on a hypothesis posited by Fodor (1975; 2008), suggests that understanding and thinking do not operate with the tool of existing human languages but with a pre-linguistic medium beyond existing languages: “People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. (...) Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa” (Pinker 1994: 81-82).

From a hermeneutical perspective, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer arrives at a similar conclusion of universal proportion. In order to understand something or someone, the Other has to be appropriated to the subjective cognition, otherwise it would remain alien: “To seek one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of the spirit, whose being is only return to itself from what is other” (Gadamer 1975: 15). If this universal hermeneutical approach, which Gadamer intended for the diachronic dimension, is shifted to the synchronic plane, it implies that understanding the Other means assimilating and integrating the Other into one’s own categories and values.⁸⁶ Consequently, this process of understanding the Other is inherently connected to domination, exploitation, and annihilation.

The relativistic approach (cf. Section 3.5) rejects this notion of understanding as a form of destructive imperialism. Instead, it recognizes language as the central medium of reflection and communication, which in turn is shaped by specific culturally imprinted categories of perception and construction. Therefore, the notion of a “language of the mind,” or lingua mentis, as a universal system of mental representation is rejected, because the mind “is not a mysterious inner mechanism of a mechanical and general kind, operating according to its own universal lingua mentis, but (...) it is a cultural production, reflecting in its make-up different ethnically and politically structured modes of operation in different circumstances” (Shotter 1993: XV; emphasis in the original).⁸⁷

Since the mind, then, is strongly influenced by sociocultural traditions, norms, beliefs, experiences, and conventions, understanding is only possible by sharing this habitus (Bourdieu) as a socially internalized disposition. Hence, the ethnocentric approach is closely linked to linguistic relativity (cf. Section 3.5) which assumes that cultural concepts, categories, and values are inscribed in a language.⁸⁸ Understanding a culture in the ethnocentric sense, then, is only possible from a position within that culture and its life-world. Consequently, the relativistic approach to understanding does not colonize the Other in the universal sense, but (a) erects insurmountable barriers between cultures, (b) does not question – and thus legitimizes – the historically evolved basis of suppression and power between cultures, and (c) can be for us, as members of supposedly superior cultures, according to Clifford Geertz, “an easy surrender to the comforts of merely being ourselves (...), and maximizing gratitude for not having been born a Vandal or an Ik” (Geertz 1986: 110-111, cited in Bredella and Christ 1995: 16).

A third approach to understanding goes beyond assumptions of universalism and relativism: the constructionist approach fundamentally questions the status of persons, “as all equal, self-enclosed (essentially indistinguishable) atomic individuals, possessing an inner sovereignty, each living their separate lives, all in isolation from each other – the supposed experience of the modern self – is an illusion, maintained by the institution between us of certain forms of communication” (Shotter 1993: 110). Thus, the onus of understanding has shifted from the autonomous subject to the structures and patterns of socioculture, as encrypted in language, although it is still the culturally shaped subject as an agent who has to undertake the acts and processes of understanding the Other, be it intra- or interculturally. Without people, there would be no acts of understanding.

In the framework of the cognitive sciences, the act of constructing meaning, then, is a process that has to be carried out by the subject who wants to understand, but also has to understand in order to ensure his or her survival in the social world. The process of understanding must be based on the linguistic categories, cultural patterns, conceptual mappings, social structures, and the Discursive body of knowledge available to the subject. Only by referring to his or her socially acquired stock of cultural knowledge can a person ascribe coherent, subjectively satisfactory and socially viable meaning to an utterance, object, or action that is to be understood. Hence, the human mind is both constituted by and realized in the use of human culture and language (cf. Chapters 2-4).

However, in the dialogic sense, understanding is always an open-ended process that can never arrive at any definite or stable meaning (cf. Section 7.2). The person who intends to understand presupposes some degree of rationality and sense in the utterances or actions of his or her counterpart, even if they are nonsensical, and tries to reconstruct the reasons for the claims of validity that subjectively underlie the (inter-)actions of the other persons. This means that the Other has to be accessible at least in certain spaces so that efforts at understanding are not completely deflected by the object of that process (cf. Section 7.1). The common ground for understanding the cultural Other can be assumed to be human behavior, emotions, and intentions in general, if one sees cultures as depositories of these human categories in a historical dimension. On closer inspection, however, this operation of understanding other cultural configurations can only lead to hypotheses and analogies with tacit references to the culturally encoded experiences of the person who tries to understand the cultural Other. This kind of understanding the Other results in an imperialistic operation of downplaying, misconceiving, and even eradicating the cultural Other; the subject’s own experiences and values are merely projected onto the Other, whose symbolic spaces are not being accessed from within his or her Lebenswelt and its socioculturally generated presuppositions.

Thus, it is obvious that an empathetic model of understanding the cultural Other cannot work. Both the subject and the object of intercultural understanding are embedded in different sociocultural “webs of significance” (Geertz) and contexts of action that structure their processes of construal (including understanding the Other) in particular perspectives and along certain schemata. If the subject can refer to others, or even to his or her self, only through cultural-semiotic media, then the idea of empathically projecting oneself into another independent I must be misconceived. As was shown in Chapter 5, there is no inner “core” of self that can make direct connections with others. The question, then, is not how I can get access to an other self, but how I can get access to the webs of significance that facilitate and guide the other’s actions. In order to succeed in this endeavor, I have to momentarily suspend my own convictions, beliefs, feelings, and intuitions which are culturally construed and socially mediated. This approach implies that there are no cross-culturally valid universal rules or structures for facilitating intercultural understanding,⁸⁹ other than the basic human experience of living in this world. The encounter with unassimilable cultural otherness “challenges us intellectually and morally, stretches our imagination, and compels us to recognize the limits of our categories of thought” (Parekh 2006: 167), thus leading us to reflect on and challenge our own cognitive, behavioral, and emotional resources. The process of intercultural understanding requires a reconstruction of the other’s presuppositions and practices which is sensible to the context that forms the basis for the other’s intuitive understanding of his or her self. The basis for this reconstruction is the third space as a genuinely new field of construction, located in-between cultural constructs and social practices, implying that my categories of construal have shifted in the act of trying to understand.

But here lies one of the fundamental difficulties in achieving intercultural understanding: one cannot suspend at will the conceptualizations, schemata, norms, values, and beliefs one has internalized in the process of socialization, as they are fundamental for the subjective cognition, behavior, and emotion to an extent that they are automatically and tacitly applied in all processes of understanding and construal. One can, however, embark on a process of understanding the other’s cultural context of (inter-)action, in the course of which the validity of one’s own tacit cultural knowledge and presuppositions is increasingly questioned and qualified. But this is only the case in a sustained manner if the alternative patterns of construction and structures of living are seen as fundamentally valid from a subjective perspective. This is potentially a long and arduous process which includes learning the other language (including its inherent conceptualizations, frames, and genres) and gaining fundamental insights to the other cultural system of meaning (and life-world), while at the same time qualifying one’s own schemata, beliefs, and attitudes.⁹⁰ Even after a sustained period of intensive learning, this process can never be concluded because the process of understanding as such is never ending.

The process of understanding is principally an open process which constantly changes according to even minimal variations in context. Thus, understanding is fundamentally an unending process, not only because of the continuously changing contextual influences, but also due to the nature of the linguistic sign as the prime mediator of meaning and understanding. The linguistic sign as a semiotic tool mediates and construes meaning for the subject and for the language community (albeit on different levels), but cannot be pinned down to one essential, unchanging meaning (cf. Section 7.1), as Stuart Hall suggests: “Meaning is always in the process of emerging, yet any final meaning is constantly deferred” (Hall 1997: 59). Hall refers here to Derrida who posits an endless chain of signifiers, one referring to the other ad infinitum: “[T]he meaning of meaning (...) is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier. (...) [I]ts force is a certain pure and infinite equivocality which gives signified meaning no respite, no rest, but engages in its own economy so that it always signifies again and differs” (Derrida 1978: 29; emphasis in the original). This entails that meaning cannot be fixed against its transcendental signified. Meaning can never be fully grasped in its entirety, because signifiers only refer, and time does not stand still for them. When we say that we know what concepts such as justice or truth mean, we do violence to these concepts because we close them down to only an aspect of what is entailed in them by attempting to fix them. Therefore, even intracultural understanding is only an approximation of understanding the interactions of other members of the linguistic and sociocultural community (cf. Chapter 4). A one-to-one understanding of the utterances and actions of the Other is never possible, since the intersubjective third space is an interplay, or subjective bricolage, of elements of the broader social and cultural influences and the contributions of each of the interactants.

However, the broader sociocultural framework of the conceptualizations, norms, patterns, and subjective positionings in Discourses fosters the illusion of an understanding of the intracultural other, which is characterized by multilateral ease and effortlessness. Of course, each intersubjective event is unique in its details but, for the participants to be able to co-construct meaning, they have to interpret the context as an instance of a jointly recognizable situation-type (e.g., a particular Discourse or genre). This distributed construal of context which facilitates the subjectively construed fleeting stability of meaning from a non-essential and dynamic flow of intersubjective blending of spaces is usually absent in intercultural communication.

However, the basic mechanisms of understanding the second language and culture are fundamentally the same as understanding the first language and culture. Problems arise in second language learning with the historically evolved and culturally charged backgrounds of meaning, the boundaries of which – according to the relativistic approach – cannot be overcome unless a person learns to understand the structures and norms of a given society (in terms of skills, customs, folkways, institutions, beliefs, and norms) and its cultural traditions from within that sociocultural framework. This is obviously an unrealistic objective for institutionalized L2 learning, because this would ultimately mean that the learner has to be immersed in the target culture for a long period of time (i.e., several years), and even then it is questionable whether his or her cultural competence can rival that of members of the other speech community, for instance, in construing the finer strands of meaning in the subtext of jokes. It is equally questionable that this individual can willfully suspend the cultural imprint of his or her own cognitive and emotional categories and concepts. But here perhaps the notions of source and target cultures we use in “understanding” this situation are too static; it is not a binary “either – or” opposition of essence, but a highly dynamic and complex one in a dialectic process of accommodation and assimilation, always focused on the subject of understanding. Neither the home culture, the target culture, nor the mind of the learner are static or atomistic entities: they all constantly interact and are consequently subject to ongoing change (cf. Chapter 7).

And here the constructionist approach in a sociocultural perspective can move us forward because of its dynamic construction of the self within a highly complex network of sociocultural, mental, and linguistic constructs in various dimensions. From this perspective, other cultures do not have to remain opaque to the L2 learner. The more the learner constructs and understands about the other language, society, and culture, the more he or she becomes critically aware of his or her own L1 linguistic categories and culturally imprinted patterns of meaning and cognitive-emotional construction. Thus, he or she may, for the moment, lose the natural unreflected confidence of moving within them but in the long run he or she gains access to other modes of interpretation and social construction which can only enrich – rather than endanger – the learner’s mind and identity. And the mind of the learner does not wander around in a state of disorientation between the logocentric, ethnocentric, and egocentric paradigms of understanding: the anchors of construal are the subjective positionings (actively and passively) within the matrix of linguistic categories, social structures, and cultural patterns available to the individual.

The second basis for intercultural understanding is the constructed and agreed “reality” of both speech communities which is intersubjectively and culturally constituted and maintained by the success of a mutually shared practice of action, which in turn determines the theoretically examinable reality (and not the other way round) (cf. Hartmann and Janich 1998: 17-21). Both bases for intercultural understanding are combined in the emerging third space which, for the subjective L2 learner, develops by increasingly gaining access to the other linguistic and cultural constructs and, at the same time, qualifying the validity of constructs of the first language, society, and culture. It is the emerging third space which facilitates intercultural understanding in a way which simultaneously recognizes the validity of the constructs of both (or more) languages, societies, and cultures, without suppressing either of them. When the ability to understand other cultures is itself mediated through language, then the critical reflection process in L2 learning must also include that of the actual position of the self within a certain cultural, institutional, and academic discourse. The process of understanding the Other is closely linked to the simultaneous process of alienating the familiar. Only on this basis can a careful cognitive departure in the direction of understanding the target culture take place.