Abstract
The genre of the catalog is pertinent to transcultural experimentation by virtue of its paradigmatic structure that juxtaposes various judgments on the same subject. Such discourse is released from the order of time or the relationship of cause and effect.1 In contrast, the syntagmatic structure, in which one proposition is deduced from another, one event succeeds another, is subject to the restrictive and oppressive effects of logical or narrative sequence.2 Transculture is a metaparadigm, a set of elements (cultures, canons, traditions, epistemes, worldviews) that coexist in a structured space rather than succeed and displace each other in time.
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Notes
A paradigm can be defined as “a class of elements that can occupy the same place in the syntagmatic string, or, in other words, a set of elements each of which is substitutable for the other in the same context.” A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979): 224. The sequence “I love you” is syntagmatic. The sets “love, hate, adore, despise” or “I, we, he, they” are paradigmatic.
On conceptualism in general and on Lev Rubinshtein in particular, see in Mikhail Epstein’s books: After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995): 29–37, 60–70; Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover). (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999): 105–118.
The first publication of all these catalogs was in Russian: Mikhail Epstein, “Katalogi,” Dar. Kul’tura Rossii 1 (1992): 68–71.
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© 1999 Ellen E. Berry, Mikhail N. Epstein
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Epstein, M. (1999). The Catalog of Catalogs. In: Transcultural Experiments. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299712_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299712_17
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