Kulturelle Identität oder Hybridität?

Abstract

This essay examines the basic problem of a static vs. a dynamic notion of culture. According to this distinction the terms multi-, trans-, and intercultural are being distinguished from each other as hierarchically controlled cultural differences, transfer of cultural differences passing unrecognized as cultural change, and cultural change through cultural differentiation beyond or before hierarchical control. Various passages from Özakin’s novel are shown to represent on the thematic level and perform on the structural and semiotic level this distinction. A certain feedback circuit of cultural estrangement and writing typical for modern literature, can be observed in Özakin’s novel which turns the narrator’s identity into hybridity and the monocultural notion of culture into an intercultural one. This observation can be theorized through radical constructivist and system-theoretical semiotics here exemplified through a brief introduction of Vico, Saussure and Levi-Strauss. The resulting intercultural model is one of a dynamic autopoiesis of culture through its communicating members as its only determinants. Culture is seen as a hybrid and therefore bound to change. Change can be best described through a semiotic analysis. Within this model, literature or fiction can stand for the space of creative cultural emergence since all culture is a matter of an agreed-upon or disagreed-with narrative about this culture vis a vis another.