ABSTRACT
There is something presumptuous or at best naïve in proposing a theory of interculturalism in contemporary mise en scène, given the complexity of the factors at stake in all cultural exchange and the difficulty of formalizing them. Every typology of cultural relations requires a metalanguage that would be, as it were, ‘above’ these relations, encompassing them all: it is hard to imagine where theorists would find this metalanguage, especially since they are themselves caught up in a language and culture from which it is difficult to disengage. Furthermore, there is no general theory of culture that correctly integrates historical, social and ideological factors without being reduced to them. Cultural studies have had the merit of rehabilitating phenomena that are not situated in the socioeconomic infrastructure and that cannot be described in purely economic or sociological terms. Conversely, however, they sometimes tend to dissolve all socioeconomic political and ideological factors in culture, to present the cultural as the social element in individual behavior, foregrounding the influence of the individual unconscious on cultural phenomena. We must avoid two exaggerations: that of a mechanical and unreconstructed Marxism that neglects the importance of cultural phenomena and their relative autonomy,1 and that of a culturalism that turns the economic and ideological infrastructure into a form of unconscious discursive superstructure.
