1

Dr. Fco. Javier Rabass Rodrguez

Dr. Carlos Antonio Rabass Rodrguez
Associate Professors, Rouen School of Management
Javier.Rabasso@groupe-esc-rouen.fr
Carlos.Rabasso@groupe-esc-rouen.fr
SECTION ON SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE
(5) Playful Technocultures. Bart Simon, Concordia University
(6) Roundtables in the Sociology of Culture. Jennifer Jordan; University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee.
American Sociology Association, 101st Annual Meeting
August 11-14, 2006, Palais des Congrs de Montral, Canada
Title: Hypertextual Technologies in Poststructuralist Transcultural Communities.
Transcultural identities and environments is an important subject of study in
recent sociological and cultural departments of business schools and educational
institutions. For the last few years our department of Languages, Culture and Society at
the Rouen School of Management has been developing for the last few years a program
on Cultural Studies and Cross Cultural Management. The subject presented in this
lecture highlights some of the different aspects and ideas we are working on in an
extensive research project. The point of departure is the new anthropological space
proposed by Pierre Lvy in Lintelligence collective (1994). This will allow us to
establish links between the hypertextual virtual practices of transversal communities
and the tradition of molecular thinking as a challenge to mechanical and linear
understanding of our environments. Intertextual relationships and non-sequential
writings and communications will show us how the configuration of transversal
communities is in the process of becoming a trend in our European risk-prevention
era, quoting Jeremy Rifkin in The European Dream (2004). Finally, the web of
relationships that transversal communities establish in our interdependent and selftranscending ecosystem will give us the possibility to embrace a revolutionary vision in
this second European Enlightenment period. Our transcultural environments made of
interdisciplinary nomadic multicultural identities, will give us the opportunity to
envision the birth of a New World from the Ancient Civilizations and the national
boundaries.
The contributions of poststructuralist thinkers for the last 30 years in the fields of
philosophy, cultural studies, literary criticism, art theory, film and communication
studies will be considered as the theoretical corpus for this study. The emergence of
transversal approaches for the configuration of alternative cultural models will help us
to better understand the importance of transcultural communities. Our purpose,
deconstructing traditional practices in the understanding of a unique model of
management, is to demonstrate how a background in humanities and fine arts are
necessary tools for the emergence of transcultural citizens. The very same notion of
transculturality developed by Malinowski and reincorporated in anthropological studies
by Fernando Ortiz (Cuba) in the first half of the XXth century (for the understanding of
identities) will be highlighted in our transversal analysis.
The break down of domains and specific areas of specialization in the XXIst
century management studies opens up the enquiry for transversalists thinkers to
establish interconnections and new identities in our business environments. We will
study how transnational organizations and the proliferation of cultural diasporas

2
challenge logocentric models of understanding, and how systems thinking and chaos
theory are also reshaping our European transversal community practices. Departing
from the reflections developed by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964)
we will examine the impact of new technologies on todays individual skills. The
techno-cultural revolution of the nineties resulting from the impact of Internet in our
daily lives, with the contribution of post-dionysian underground cultures in Silicon
Valley, California (the beats, the hippies, the cyberpunks, the new breed) will help us to
understand the emergence of transcultural communties.
As a recent field of study in cross cultural environments, we will examine a
specific international language community The Hispanic Culture- to illustrate some of
the features of transcultural communties. In Latin America and the USA this
community, like many African business relationships, is a fusion of heterogeneous
components connected to the (super) natural worlds. We will see how they are
undergoing a radical transformation due in large to the new technologies and their
influence on global environments. The syncretic characteristic of Latin Hispanic
Civilization will be related to other specificities of the digital world. The hypertextual
and multidisciplinary universe of Hispanic Cultures, whose literary referent will be
drawn from such cybernetic works as Hopscotch (1965) by Julio Cortzar and The
Garden of Forging Paths in Fictions (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges, will be explored in
light of the new strategies of communication that the cyber technological development
is creating. In addition, different aspects such as cultural microspecificities, non verbal
communicational signs of behaviour, and relations to the environment will be
interrelated to a plurality of approaches that the Latin Hispanic Cultural Ethos offers to
transcultural communties.

Key words: Anarchy, transcultural community, cultural studies, hypertext, molecular

thinking, environment, logocentrism, systems thinking, chaos theory, European
transcultural community, techno-cultural revolution, latin cultures, Hispanic culture,
countercultures, cyberspace.

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This is a paper with an interdisciplinary point of view on the nature of
transcultural communities working in open organization environments. Part of our
initial work was presented at the Egos Colloquium in Berlin in june 2005. Our
reflexions on transcultural environments came from a web of literary, sociological,
anthropological, philosophical and communication sources drawn from different
cultures and literatures. We found the material of fictional literature just as important in
understanding our contemporary transcultural environments as the essays and scholarly
work of our intellectual community. The purpose of presenting this transversal
approach to cultural sociology and transcultural organizations is to broaden the scope of
our educational community towards human sciences and transcultural studies, areas of
knowledge still poorly used in our educational and business schools, where disciplines
such as management, marketing, human resources and so on supposedly include the
mentioned humanist fields in their course outlines and seminars. We believe that for the
intellectual development of our students and future managers or cultural entrepreneurs,
it is vital that business institutions value the role of humanist disciplines of critical
enquiry with independent multidisciplinary human sciences departments. Along this
line of thought, we will see how different management and techno cultures respecting
the peculiarities and/or the specific characteristics of each culture can contribute in the
creation of open and transcultural organizations.
We caution the reader about the contentious nature and at the same time the
lightness of our interpretation in many parts of this work. This is in to encourage
debate and break down preset notions. The excessive seriousness of scholarly works is
something we try to avoid as much as possible. As a transversalist researchers we try to
remain on the the surface of things allowing us to hop from one idea to another in the
same way we click from one window to another in our computers anytime we find it
necessary. This is hypertext land where finishing a line of thought or structuring
certain parts into different categories to better understand them is strictly prohibited.
To understand how we develop a critical thinking approach towards the
configuration of transcultural communities in poststructuralist environments, our study
started by deconstructing one of the questions posed in the presentation of the section
for the Egos Colloquium, Role of Culture in Unlocking Organizations, for the
Unlocking Organizations Conference in Berlin: How open can a culture be without
leading to anarchy? This question implied a presupposition that associated the term
anarchy to something dangerous or negative in relation to the openness of a specific

4
culture. And within this culture I would include the role of transcultural identities. In
certain cultures, anarchy is a driving force for creativity, self-management and direct
participation in the organizations. In others, it threatens the very basis of a society.
Therefore, from which culture can we consider the question posed by the Egos
Colloquium? Ideological constrains are also implicit in the presentation of the term as
something should avoid. Most readers and participants in the discussion will agree with
the meanings and the implications of anarchy as a negative force and therefore, this
assumption already jeopardizes the emergence of an open culture within a specific
transcultural environment and their organizational practices. From this perspective most
of the audience would belong to a collective mindset that shares common views on the
meaning of anarchy. Another presupposition. The educational habitus (Bourdieu)1
of the scholarly educational community would respond unfavourably to any participant
that did not share the same world view of anarchy as something negative. Going even
further, any participant at the Egos Colloquium that would consider him/herself as an
anarchist would had be seen as a dangerous subject. A third presupposition. How can
we discuss cultural differences if we are already entering an open debate with a term
that by its inner potential meanings could create some hermeneutical disagreements in
the audience? To any dissident thinker in our conservative educational and business
environments these presuppositions reflected a logocentric approach to a concept
largely misunderstood in our society, a word demonised by the mass media and most of
our economic and cultural institutions.
Instead we could change the question posed to understand how certain terms are
closely related or intertwined in a web of relationships that complement each other. For
instance, if we say, how closed can a culture be without leading to dictatorship? there is
another negative presupposition that relates closure to totalitarianism as openness
could lead to anarchy. Yet, considering these questions we are still in a tradition of
linear thinking. We use certain concepts from a point of departure A (open, closed
culture or organization) to a point of destination B (anarchy, dictatorship). We go from
linguistic signifiers to signifieds without considering the change of referents in
dynamic, interactive and fuzzy environments. Language and culture are directly tied
to a community of speakers. Depending on the context from which cultural values are
For Bourdieu it is through the habitus that social reproduction takes place. We discussed earlier how
education, like any field, is comprised of complex objective relations and structures. These include the
relations between teachers, students and the subject matter of the various disciplines to which they are
exposed; the bureaucratic structure of the school and its relations with other schools and state agencies
that support it; the class relations that pertain between different students, or between students and
teachers, and so on. Jen Webb, Tony Schirato and Geoff Danaher. Understanding Bourdieu. London:
SAGE Publications, 2002. 115-116.
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produced, we often fall into the trap of binary oppositions, a western way of thinking
where heuristic devices such as openness and closure are opposing categories that
exclude each other, as anarchy and dictatorship are antonymous and conflicting terms.
We tend to manipulate discourse according to the acceptance of its utterances in any
context that is charged with ideological constrains. This brings us to a question that has
not been posed when it comes to talking about the opening of a culture or of an
unlocking organization in our 21st century transcultural environments. The question
should have included the opposite term of dictatorship, as closure is the opposite term
of openness. This term is democracy - a term which is something rare and extravagant
in many of our undemocratic and self-centered economic institutions. The question
could have been as follows: how open can a culture be before leading us to democracy?
Instead of the implicit fears that is carried by the first question (fear as another strategy
commonly used by the mass media), the issue of democracy would force the readers and
the participants to rethink another presupposition. This presupposition takes democracy
for granted, as something already accomplished in our modern, advanced and
technological societies. But if we do a close reading of the term according to the
standard practices in the transnational companies that govern the world, we would be
surprised to see how far from democracy most of our international organizations have
been and how close to other forms of government... For instance, downsizing and
outsourcing are commonly accepted today as the standard practice of companies to
remain competitive. Both are the result of a shift of a diminished working force recycled
into the service sector. Due to the lack of participation by workers in our organizations,
manual and brain labour in most of our western organizations have been decreasing.
When we talk about culture and openness we have to take into account the
narrow minded discourse of our business, educational and media environments when it
comes to dealing with terms such as anarchy. This would be considered by
mainstream thinking as synonymous with chaos, violence, disorder, pandemonium,
apocalypse and the end of the world. However, for a minority it could mean direct
democracy, open participation of all the members of a community in the decision
making process, direct control of design, production, distribution, marketing,
communication and management practices in our organizations. We see anarchy as a
poststructuralist, polyphonic discourse, heteroglosia2, a centripetal force of language in
In this view ideology cannot be conceived as something to be avoided at all cost; it is inescapable in
every moment of human speech. We speak with our ideology our collection of languages, of wordsladen-with-values. And the speaking is always thus more or less polyglot- it is a collection. Though some
speakers may aspire to the condition of monologue, we have all inherited languages from many different
sources (science, art, religion, class, etc.), and to attempt to rule out all voices but my own is at best an
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a process of decentralization and exchange, an ideological dissonance open to
performance, action and movement. It carries within its potential meanings an
uninterrupted stream of ideas in an environment of differance3. It helps us to
deconstruct everything and to challenge the ethnocentric views of our business and
educational institutions. They impose closure where our Third Millennium invites us to
apprehend the world without understanding its wholeness. We view anarchy as a
phenomenological quest for intersubjectivity, a Dasein that only has meaning, so far
as the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world can be filled in by the entities discoverable
in that disclosedness (Heidegger, 193).
The controversy over the possibility of sharing a similar horizon of
expectations4 about the terms we have referred to helps us to consider every institution,
organization or society as another ideological construct that many times overlooks the
common interest and the collective consensus. A very important task of our educational
activity would be to show our future transcultural communities new ways of thinking
that will question these presuppositions, offering new paths of unlearning materials.
We understand education as another tool to enlighten our spirits in our classrooms and
not as a strategy to impose ignorance or apathy to a political class that has been
deeply indoctrinated5. If we take a look at most of our educational programs in our
business schools there is very little space for critical thinking and too much for standard
views. The presence of so many business entrepreneurs in our teaching staff confirms
our suspicions. What matters for most of our educational institutions is to offer
companies a fresh new troop of well trained young white collar consumers ready to
work as many hours as necessary, even if they could live with half of the salaries
offered by their employers. Nevertheless most of our companies do not listen to what
artificial pretense. We are constituted in polyphony. Gary Saul Morson, ed. Bakhtin. Essays and
Dialogues on His Work. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. 151.
3
Differance indicates the middle voice, it precedes and sets up the opposition between passivity and
activity. With its a, difference more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the
origin of production of differences and the differences between differences, the play (jeu) of differences.
Jacques Derrida. Speech and Phenomena. And Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973. 130.
4
Literary understanding becomes dialogical only when the otherness of the text is sought and recognized
from the horizon of our own expectations, when no nave fusion of horizon is considered, and when ones
own expectation are corrected and extended by the experience of other. Hans Robert Jauss. The Identity
of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding. Identity of the Literary Text. Mario J.
Valds and Owen Miller, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. 148.
5
The importance of controlling the public mind has been recognized with increasing clarity as popular
struggles succeeded in extending the modalities of democracy, thus giving rise to what liberal elites call
the crisis of democracy as when normally passive and apathetic populations become organized and seek
to enter the political arena to pursue their interest and demands, threatening stability and order . Noam
Chomsky. Profit Over People. Neoliberalism and Global Order. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
53.

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the educational elites could say about their behaviour. The symbolic capital6 of our
business schools and universities (the neurological and creative virtual matter produced
in the classrooms, the libraries and the laboratories) is only taken into account when it
serves the specific interests of the business community. As it happens in the military
schools and after in the frontline, where no one could question the armys principles and
strategies, business schools have become training camps7, marketing diplomas in
packaging institutions. Market fundamentalists do their job as teaching participants in
the organization, and culture has been so far just a commodity. The need, as European
scholars and transcultural practices, to rebuild technological learned organizations the
way our ancient universities encouraged students to develop critical views about the
environment is a must for the shaping of a neo-European Renaissance and enlightened
business milieu.
Our transcultural community hypertextual project implemented in part of our
courses goes towards a critical approach of traditional learning and westernised
models of discourse. The need for transversal scholars from different geopolitical
backgrounds to create links between disciplines and areas of specialization is a necessity
in an open transcultural technological organization. For instance, the meaning of open
is not easily understood by different language communities. The terms open and
closed are not perceived in the same way in different cultural milieu. Transparency
and opacity are semantic implications from the former concepts and are fully charged
with cultural and ideological bias. We usually identify global markets with an open
exchange of products and services while supranational communities such as the
European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement have closed territories in
relation to the people and the merchandises coming from outside. We have witnessed
Symbolic capital is a form of power that is not perceived as power but as legitimate demands for
recognition, deference, obedience, or the service of others () Bourdieu understands symbolic capital as
a sort of advance, extended by the dominated to the dominant as long as the dominated find it is within
their interest to accord recognition and legitimation to the dominant. David Swartz. Culture and Power.
The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997. 90-92.
7
In France the business schools system, separated from the public educational system, is little understood
by Europeans and North Americans. Once the student-recruit gets into the institutions, they rarely fail.
90% of the students obtain their final diploma after three years of study. This questions the credibility
of the organization. In general French companies never ask for the marks. The diploma and the ranking
of the business school are good enough for the recruitment of young managers. This is more important
than the final marks. An A business student from the university is less consider by the companies than a C
student from a business school. Most of the outstanding university students know that they have very
little chance of becoming top managers in French companies. The endogamy of the privileged business
institutions in France nurtures a lack of competition within the student community and a collective
apathy and indifference towards learning and knowledge. This lack of interest does not exclude a
demoralized senior teaching staff that most of the times does not know its real place and role in such an
organization.
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for the last ten years the double discourse of our economic and cultural institutions.
From one side they preach opening of closed markets and from another side they protect
their own products and services from outside competitors. Third World countries no
longer trust the philosophical discourses of open economic and cultural policies when
they see the unfair treatment they receive from the preachers of transnational
organizations.
The space of knowledge presented by the communication and anthropological
scholar Pierre Lvy in The Collective Intelligence (1994) will allow us to establish links
between hypertextual understandings of the environment by transcultural communities
in our contemporary molecular world. Throughout the history of menkind, the Earth,
the territory, the space of merchandises and the space of knowledge have responded to
the needs of different systems of organizations. The four spaces develop endless
relationships of semiotic representations which in Hispanic cultures take the
geometrical forms of labyrinths. A fusion of the mythical and the real in a dionysian
cosmopdie culminate in a fourth space where the mixture of the sacred and the
profane invites us to participate in the spiritual quest for wisdom. Ritual that helps us
to build infinite trees of knowledge in a space where
des intellectuels collectives mergent, se connectent, se dplacent et mutent.
Cest de la circulation, de lassociation et de la mtamorphose des communauts
pensantes que nat et se perptue lEspace du savoir. Chaque intellectuel
collectif scrte un monde virtuel exprimant les relations quil entretien en son
sein, les problmes qui le mettent en mouvement, les images quil se forge de
son environnement, sa mmoire, son savoir en gnral. Les membres de
lintellectuel collectif coproduisent, amnagent et modifient continuellement le
monde virtuel qui exprime leur communaut : lintellectuel collectif ne cesse
dapprendre et dinventer8.
The dynamics of this intelligent transcultural and technological environment find its
starting point in an emergent collective vision establishing further inter-connections
within organizations (intelligent networking) to evaluate, to make decisions, to express
ideas and to listen to other alternatives within this neurological ensemble. This type of
openly direct democratic organization network functions as a post-cultural civilization,
as a cross-cultural global civilization (a trans-learned cyber-hypertextual world
collective intelligence emerges, interconnects, displaces and changes. It is from the circulation, the
association and the metamorphosis of thinking communities that the Space of Knowledge is born and
perpetuated. Every collective intelligence secretes a virtual world that expresses its inner relationship, its
problems that makes them move, the perceptive images from the environment, its memory and
knowledge in general. The members of the collective intelligence continuously co-produce, adjust and
modify the virtual world manifested by their community: the collective intelligence never stops learning
and creating. Pierre Lvy. Lintelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace. Paris : La
Dcouverte, 1994. 152.
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encyclopaedia of infinite knowledge) and coexists with other categories in the
noosphre, the new convergence of the human world spirit9.
The clash of civilisations highlighted by Samuel Huntington a few years ago10
does not confront cultural identities today but sets up the debate between closed
economic and cultural organizations (for instance, there has not been any women on the
IMF board of directors) that serve privileged elites and those who do not believe in the
ideological patterns of the global doctrine and their consequences leading to
consumerism. The third of the world population that belongs to the consumer class or
consumer society could be considered as a 21st century open transnational consumer
civilisation. Its set of values has very little to do with the traditional world views of the
closed cultural civilisations that existed up to the end of the 20th century. The notions of
openness or closure are losing their particular cultural meanings as this new world class
is becoming more concerned with access11 and less with belonging. From a crosscultural perspective we can find examples in the Hispanic cultures on how the
perception of open and close linguistic utterances are related to the colonized and the
colonizing territories (the land, the body, the language, the moral values). As Octavio
Paz, Nobel Prize of Literature, told us in The Labyrinth of Solitude:
Chingar, then, is to do violence to another. The verb is masculine, active, and
cruel: it stings, wounds, gashes, stains. And it provokes a bitter, resentful
satisfaction. The person who suffers this action is passive, inert and open, in
contrast to the active, aggressive and closed person who inflicts it. The chingn
is the macho, the male; he rips open the chingada, the female, who is pure
passivity, defenceless against the exterior world. The relationship between them
is violent, and it is determined by the cynical power of the first and the
impotence of the second. The idea of violence rules darkly over all the meaning
Dans la cyberculture venir, il y aura de moins en moins de distinction entre le march universel
explorant toutes les formes de biens, la mdiathque universelle explorant tous les pouvoirs, le laboratoire
universel simulant toutes les expriences, le snat universel explorant toutes les formes dadministration,
le tribunal universel explorant toutes les formes de conflits et de rsolution de conflit, lcole universelle
enfin, proposant lexploration de chacun toutes les formes dcouvertes par les humains et dont les
professeurs seront tous les gens dsireux denseigner et qui voudront contribuer ldification et la
transmission de la culture. Pierre Lvy. World Philosophie. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000. 175.
10
Alone among civilizations the West has had a major and at times devastating impact on every other
civilization. The relation between the power and culture of the West and the power and cultures of other
civilizations is, as a result, the most pervasive characteristic of the world of civilizations. As the relative
power of other civilizations increases, the appeal of Western cultures fades and non-Western peoples
have increasing confidence in and commitment to their indigenous cultures. The central problem in the
relations between the West and the rest is, consequently, the discordance between the Wests
particularly Americas- efforts to promote a universal Western culture and its declining ability to do so.
Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. London:
Touchstone, 1998. 183.
11
Some would argue that by steadily reducing the significance of place and elevating the value or
relationships and experiences, we may slowly advance the human agenda to a higher plane. Others,
however, might counter that in the new Age of Access, where questions of mine and thine begin to recede
to the background, we risk losing our moorings and a sense of deep communion with the physical and
biological ground to which we owe our very existence and being in the world. Jeremy Rifkin. The Age
of Access. London: Penguin Books, 2001. 132.
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of the word, and the dialectic of the closed and the open thus fulfils itself
with an almost ferocious precision (O. Paz, 77).
The Hispanic debate throughout the 19th century of a Latin American identity
misunderstood these concepts relating the idea of civilization to the open and that of
barbarism to the closed. Following the principles of the Monroe doctrine, anything that
came from the West (USA and after Europe) served as the aspiring model of progress
and modernity: the city, the factories, the working class, the white race. Barbarism was
identified with the wilderness, the indigenous traditions, the campesinos and the
mestizo (Sarmiento). It was after the revisionist work of Jos Mart in Nuestra
Amrica (Cuba) in the late 19th century that the concept of civilization was related to
the traditions and the history of the natives; and barbarism to the invaders of an ancient
land conquered by the sword supposedly in the name of God but in reality for gold.
Slavery and capitalism helped to develop a self-indulgent Western Civilization that set
up the rules and national boundaries leaving behind the extermination of 70 million
Native Americans and 15 million Africans.
The tradition of great Latin American emotional thinkers, the poets and the
fictional writers, can help us to better understand the collective brain frame of the
Hispanic ethos in relation to the shaping of a technological and transcultural
communities state of the mind. We hope that our literary understanding of these
heuristic devices will help educational and business environments to reconsider
alternative humanist perspectives about the multiple identities of our organizations. The
work of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Argentineans Jorge Luis Borges and
Julio Cortzar anticipated in their fictionalised epistemological enquiry the
configuration of several hypertextual models of knowledge. The fragmented and
polyphonic nature of their discourses gave us some cues about the emergence of a
transnational cultural identity. The concept of transculturality was developed by
Fernando Ortiz in Cuba in the first half of the 20th century, after the anthropological
studies of Malinowski. For the Cuban scholar, this notion
expresa mejor las diferentes fases del proceso transitivo de una cultura a otra,
porque ste no consiste solamente en adquirir una nueva y distinta cultura, que
es lo en rigor indicado por la voz inglesa acculturation, sino que el proceso
implica tambin necesariamente la prdida o desarraigo de una cultura
precedente, lo que pudiera decirse una desculturacin, y adems, significa la

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consiguiente creacin de nuevos fenmenos culturales que pudieran
denominarse de neoculturacin12.
In terms of the transcultural nature of many organizations, it is crucial for crosscultural education to take into consideration several elements that are part of the specific
realities of each civilization such as national pride, ethnical differences, family types,
system of believes, artistic and literary backgrounds, spiritual values etc. One of the
features that unite most of Latin cultures is a humanist understanding of life detached
from material greed. The intellectual tools to interpret and to apprehend reality are
logic, dialectics and rhetoric. But what differentiates Hispanic from the Latin cultures is
in the way they perceive the idea of the real. The presence of hypertextual, fragmented,
open and decentered configurations of the real in the Hispanic ethos differs greatly from
the structuralist, closed, monochronic and rational entities of Latin cultures in the
Western world, which follow the French model of civilization. The dialectics of the
invisible (also very important in the African ethos) find in Hispanic cultures a hybrid
ally. The conceptual syncretism of European, Amerindian and African backgrounds
form singular understandings of the world which differentiates latino cultures from
their European Latin counterparts. However, Spain, a melting pot of languages and
cultures, finds in syncretism another way of expressing a multiplicity of mentalities in
the same national territory.
We are and we are not Europeans, what are we then?. In The search of the
present, discourse given by Octavio Paz when he received the Nobel Prize of Literature
in 1990, the question of the Hispanic identity was related to the awareness of the
distance expressed as a permanent attitude of the people in the history of Latin
American spirituality: todas nuestras empresas y acciones, todo lo que hacemos y
soamos, son puentes para romper la separacin y unirnos al mundo y a nuestros
semejantes13. This reflects a collective conscience in a permanent search of a
continuous present, of a dure in a Modernity of market economy which, following
Paz ideas, es un mecanismo eficaz pero, como todos los mecanismos, no tiene
better explains the different phases of transition between one culture to another, because this does not
consist only in acquiring a new and distinct culture, which is what the English term acculturation
indicates. The process means a necessary lost or eradication of the precedent culture, what we can call a
desculturation. It also means the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, something we can call
neoculturation. Fernando Ortiz. Del fenmeno social de la transculturacin y de su importancia en
Cuba. Estudios Afrocubanos. Ed. Lzara Menndez, Tomo I. La Habana: Facultad de Artes y Letras,
1990. 243-244.
13
all our actions and accomplishments, everything we do and dream, are bridges to break down our
separation from the world and the people. Octavio Paz. La bsqueda del presente. Revista Canadiense
de Estudios Hispnicos. Volumen XVI, No. 3. Primavera 1992. 385.
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conciencia y tampoco misericordia14. Before the perception of our democratic societies
perceived as islas de abundancia en el ocano de la miseria universal15, Paz proposes a
philosophy of the present based on the poetic experience of the everydayness. This is
characterized by a simultaneity of time and presence charged with instantaneity and
transcendence, immediacy and real time hermeneutics. He offers us the possibility of
grasping a fractal identity of history which relates verbal time to el otro tiempo, el
verdadero, el que buscbamos sin saberlo: el presente, la presencia16. If Modernity
embraces progress, reason and technological metaphysics as an alternative to the
Christian God, for Octavio Paz the artificial nature of man takes away from its identity
the core of a spiritual quest:
The complexity of contemporary society and the specialization required by its
work extend the abstract condition of the worker to other social groups. It is said
that we live in a world of techniques. Despite the differences in salary and way
of life, the situation of the technician is essentially like that of the worker: he too
is salaried and lacks a true awareness of what he creates. A government of
technicians the ideal of contemporary society- would thus be a government of
instruments. Functions would progress with great efficiency but without aim,
and the repetition of the same gesture, a distinction of the machine, would bring
about an unknown form of immobility, that of a mechanism advancing from
nowhere toward nowhere. The totalitarian regimes have done nothing but to
extend this condition and make it general, by means of force or propaganda17.
Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent explains how the Propaganda Model
functions in a democratic society. His analysis of the mass media in the United States
does not exclude the strategies and impact of the communication technologies on other
parts of the world. His study helps us to reconsider the way we use information as the
raw material of knowledge and the dangers of isolating it from discourse:
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to
the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to
inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will
integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of
concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role
requires systematic propaganda18.

is an efficient mechanism but, like all the mechanisms, do not have a conscience neither compassion.
Octavio Paz, 1992. 392.
15
islands of plenty in the ocean of universal misery. Octavio Paz, 1992. 392.
16
the other time, the authentic, the one we are looking for without knowing it: the present, the presence.
Octavio Paz, 1992. 393.
17
Octavio Paz. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press, Inc, 1985. 68.
18
Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent. The Political Economy of the Mass Media. London: Vintage,
1984. 1.
14

13
Chomsky, an American linguistic and political thinker, shows the reader how the
essential ingredients of the propaganda model, which he calls filters19, interact with
one another to serve the interest of a specific class the political class, more or less
20% of the population that has a role to play in the decision making process. The
knowledge class of corporate power has opened up the process for a new social
disparity - the digital divide, a technological inequality of Internet-haves and havenots - that has increased the cultural and economic distance between the rich and the
poor. But as Manuel Castells rethinks the notions of disparity in the New Information
Age20, the last scandals of corporate crooks in Europe and the United States, as well
as the financial crisis in Argentina (December 2001), illustrates the cracks in the
international economic institutions. Ethical issues have been in the front page of
business news as provocative thinkers and filmmakers have depicted the lack of
conscience of downsizing transnational communities21.
The European transcultural citizen in the first decade of the Third Millennium
fluctuates between different models of cross-cultural communities. The constructive
critical understanding of the complexities of our new environments allows him/her to
reinvent new roles. Mastering a diversity of languages and being aware of the different
local idiosyncratic values, his/her communication skills encourage collective decisions
from all the members of a neurological production spiral. In a world of molecular
organizations there is no place for mechanical individualistic responses. The specific
functions of the members of an organization collapse before the rapid creation of new
activities and the immediacy of the strategies in a networked environment of a
collective intelligence. If the fundamental nature of the universe is disorder,
The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news filters, fall under the following
headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant
mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the
media on information provided by government, business, and experts funded and approved by these
primary sources and agents of power; (4) flak as a means of disciplining the media; and agents of
power; (5) anticommunism as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with
and reinforce one another. Chomsky, 1984. 2.
20
Is it really true that people and countries become excluded because they are disconnected from
Internet-based networks ? Or, rather, it is because of their connection that they become dependent on
economies and cultures in which they have little chance of finding their own path of material well-being
and cultural identity?. Manuel Castells. The Internet Galaxy. Reflections on the Internet, Business, and
Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 247.
21
Corporations are posting the biggest profits ever. All is well in America. Right. That explains why
one out of every four children in America still lives in poverty, why more Americans filed for bankruptcy
last year than ever before, why real income hasnt risen in nearly twenty years, and why the number of
people who fear being downsized, according to a recent poll conducted by the Federal Reserve Board, has
doubled since 1991. The truth is that the richest 1 percent in the United States now own 40 percent of the
wealth. Michael Moore. Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American. New York:
Harper Perennial, 1997. 1-2.
19

14
complexity and chaos, instead of controlling the unpredictable with logic and dogmatic
values, our 21st transcultural century will live with entropy, interplaying with a
multiplicity of views that require feed-back from our quantum landscape cyber-realities.
If the individuals of the past century were a product of the printing press where paper as
passive information established the bureaucratic patterns of its activities and national
languages forged its cultural identity; the transcultural community lives in new belief
systems and cultural referents. If in our Postmodern era, electric technology seems to
favour the inclusive and participating spoken world over the specialist written word22,
the collapse of Western values announces the end of linear thinking and specialist
domains. Thirty five years ago Alvin Toffler already pointed out the rapid change
occurring within the organization itself: Titles change from week to week. Jobs are
transformed. Responsibilities shift. Vast organizational structures are taken apart, bolted
together again in new forms, then re-arranged again. Departments and divisions spring
up overnight only to vanish in another, and yet another, re-organization23. A new adhocracy of mobile corporate workers and task-force project managers served
temporary companies breaking down functional divisions and accelerating the
transitional process in self-destroying organizations built to flip, not to last. A
migration elite starts moving from organizational structures towards a frenzy braindrain of virtual space.
The birth of the Information Age anticipated, a few decades ago, our
biotechnological revolution in cybernetic post-human technological organizations24.
Hierarchy flattens, robotics take over routine activities and Weberian bureaucracies
slowly disappear marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and
shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing25. Instead, we
surf in a matrix of holographic environments, a consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught
mathematical concepts. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of
every computer in the human system26. Hypertextual identities anticipate the
wetware between our human nervous system to the computer hardware. This, as
Timothy Leary highlighted in Chaos and Cyberculture (1994), will empower the
Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. New York: The New American
Library, 1964. 85.
23
Alvin Toffler. Future Shock. London: Pan Books Ltd, 1970. 123.
24
The emergence of technology was a milestone in the evolution of intelligence on Earth because it
represented a new means of evolution recording its designs. The next milestone will be technology
creating its own next generation without human intervention. Ray Kurzwell. The Age of Spiritual
Machines. New York: Viking, 1999. 36.
25
George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1989. 77.
26
William Gibson. Neuromancer. London : HarperCollinsPublisher, 2001. 67.
22

15
individual against the brainwashing forces of the industrial slave driving and imperialist
expansion. The western Cartesian logocentric manifesto I think therefore I am breaks
into pieces before other ways of apprehending reality, already known in Hispanic
cultures which is much closer to Learys truism, Think for Yourself, Question
Authority. The one way individualist act of thinking becomes a speech-act of critical
participation where rhythm and emotion set the pace for understanding and developing
fuzzy thinking. In a poststructuralist environment being and belonging are
synonymous and are the consequence of sharing language and culture within a linguistic
community. The oral tradition of the spoken word opens up the act of thinking towards
a non linear hermeneutic strategy of explanation and understanding. The notion of
take (coming from jazz and used in literature and the arts) becomes crucial for
encouraging discourse and communication in a poststructuralist organization:
Why am I writing this? I have no clear ideas, I do not even have ideas. There are
tugs, impulses, blocks, and everything is looking for a form, then rhythm comes
into play and I write within that rhythm. I write by it, moved by it and not by
that thing they call thought and which turns out prose, literature, or what have
you. First there is a confused situation, which can only be defined by words; I
start out from this half-shadow and if what I mean (if what is meant) has
sufficient strength, the swing begins at once, a rhythmic swaying that draws me
to the surface, lights everything up, conjugates this confused material and the
one who suffers it into a clear third somehow fateful level: sentence, paragraph,
page, chapter, book. This swaying, this swing in which confused material goes
about taking shape, is for me the only certainty of its necessity, because no
sooner does it stop than I understand that I no longer have anything to say27.
Chapter 82 of Hopscotch, written by Julio Cortzar, anticipates the hypertext as
the changing, polymorphic, and never-ending interactive textuality of our times as this
can be applied to the structure of the organizations and the activity of our transcultural
communities. Instead of developing linear strategies and preconceived methodologies,
our environment will help us to construct endless tables of instructions similar to
those suggested by Cortzar in his novel:
In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The
first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of
which there are three garish little stars which stands for the words The End.
Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience. The
second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the
sequence indicated at the end of each chapter. In case of confusion or
forgetfulness, one need only consult the following list: 73-1-2-116-3-84-4-71-581-74-6-7-8-93-68-9-104-10-65-11-136-12-106-13-115-114-117-15-120-

27

Julio Cortzar. Hopscotch. Transl. by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966. 402.

16
and so on. There is a third way to read the novel: starting with the chapters we like the
most. There is also a forth way: getting rid of the ones we do not like. There is even a
fifth, a sixth, a seventh and many other wayssuch as adding our own written chapters
to the novel, or inviting other readers to add their own writings, readings, jazz
standards, philosophical aphorism, pictures and film sequences etc. There are even
visual and acoustic ways to rewrite the novel28 where jazz music plays a very important
part in the chaotic and playful spirit of the hypertext.
The clicking links of different (written, visual, acoustic and sensory) texts in
metonymic relationships of contiguity is a common activity of almost 1 billion people
using the World Wide Web. Hypertextual constructs are radical ways to escape from
Western metaphysics (the closeness of interpretations, the search for the truth) and
embrace other alternatives. Instead of going over the wholeness of a text from
beginning to end, another phenomenological experience allows us to select meaningful
signs on the screen (icons, symbols, indexes) and to continue experiencing the
passage from one surface to another. The loss of the referent is also that of the
message. This infinite market of signs referring to other signs without searching for
meaning has also been the common behaviour of transnational organizations when
coping with language expressions and attitudes such as being more competitive, making
more profit and so on. Decisions were made without understanding the dangerous
implications of speeding up the closure of space in our global territory (outsourcing).
Nevertheless, as in business environments, hypertextual reading, poorly managed,
becomes textual zapping where the viewer loses his/her conscience of comprehending
reality (what is seen or perceived) the same way the traditional manager, a cog within
the mechanical organization, loses touch with the ethical values and responsibilities
(downsizing) that any institution should have with its participants.
The eagerness of our times to feed our neurological hunger (information as
nourishment for the brain) has overestimated the power of technology. People have
been left behind in an emotional breakdown of human skills. Instead of getting rid of
bureaucracy our organizations misunderstood the uses of technology worshiping the
wonders of Emailing, Power Point and other communication tools. However, the dual
discourse of our institutions did not fool their participants. Downshifting becomes the
There is a double CD that came out recently, Jazzuela, about the musical references (jazz mostly) in the
novel. A film made in the late seventies capture the spirit of the novel with the participation of a real
character, Sal Yurkievich, one of the most important literary critics on Cortzars fiction, as an alter-ego
of a fictional character from the novel (Oliveira).
28

17
norm in an environment where the frontiers between the public and private spheres are
not easily recognizable and most of our managers end up receiving and answering
messages at any time of the day or night which they cannot escape. The mental break
down of many stressed-out business entrepreneurs unable to keep up with the ever
demanding performance environment (they are forced to be fresh, fast and friendly) and
the excessive use of prozac and other enhancing drugs warns us about the inefficient use
of technology in the working place and confirms Huxleys predictions 70 years ago29.
The need to find alternatives to the stressful western management habits in our business
practices is a necessity in our emotionally dysfunctional organizations. Cross-cultural
management and critical thinking become a requirement in our educational and business
institutions to save people from mental exhaustion and information over-load
syndromes.
Hispanic hypertexts can help us to reconsider the way we understand the
diversity of cultures, for instance, to write in different languages. The importance of
linear thinking is fundamental in English, and more so in German. In Spanish we tend to
transpose the oral utterances into the text. The consequence is that the written language
is less fixed. A spontaneous flow of ideas come into form without the limitations
imposed by structure. There is already an implicit hypertextual presence within the text
in polychronic cultures where people tend to finish later or maana what they can do
within the programmed schedule. Transcultural managers and educators in open
organizations will have to understand that in the Hispanic and European everydayness,
time is the absence of money30, meaning that a sacred value in our Latin and
European societies is relationships31. Things more important than money and pure profit
fulfil the interest of a business community open to dialogue and emotional exchange;
whereas many western organizational practices prone to monochronic behaviour.
Friendship and loving relationships (even casual encounters) within the organization are
an extension of an emotional management morality, unacceptable in the puritanical
male oriented Anglo-Saxon companies which consider them as personal interest and
sexual harassment behaviour.
Now such is progress- the old men work, the old men copulate, the old man have no time, no leisure
for pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gram for
a half-holiday, a gram for a weekend, two grams for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity
on the moon. Aldous Huxley. Brave New World. London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1994. 49.
30
An expression coming from one of the characters from a Wim Wenders film, The End of Violence.
31
In Europe, I see men and women lingering for hours over food and drink in the eateries and outdoor
cafs. Although not unusual in itself, whats strange is that I see them at these establishments at all hours,
not just at lunch or at the end of the day, as would be the case in America. The first thought that crosses
my mind is, Are these people all unemployed or just slow to get back to their desks and their
assignments? Jeremy Rifkin. The European Dream. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 75.
29

18
The term hypertext has been used since the beginning of the seventies. The
creator of the concept, Ted Nelson, saw it as non sequential writing text that
branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As
popularly conceived, this is a series of chunks connected by links which offer the reader
different pathways32. The creation of this device allowed the readers to broaden their
views on the original text (like the original idea or point of departure), in a kind of
mise-en-abme. There is an infinite combination of reading (sensory) material aided
by our memory which serves as a fundamental tool in the oral traditions and ancient
civilizations: hypertext uses machine memory in a way that has no analogue in the
traditional text environment, where composition relies on the organization of human
memory. It is the organization of memory in the computer and in the mind that defines
hypertext and makes it fundamentally different from conventional text33.
The novel of Cortzar demonstrates a felt intuition in the collective unconscious
of the Hispanic civilization: the failure of the ontological paradigm which proclaimed a
fixed model for understanding reality. Prior to the Christian vision of Creation as
something completed in its wholeness, Hispanic literary hypertexts offer another
reading of the universe where human nature is like a work in progress, something in
the process of being playfully made and never completed:
En remplaant le titre initial: Mandala par celui, dfinitif, de Rayuela (Marelle),
Julio Cortzar dgrve son roman de tout excs sacramental. Il rend explicite
laxe ludique gnrateur du texte, qui le traverse tout entier () et privilgie la
notion du jeu par rapport celle du rituel initiatique () substitue le centre ou
cercle suprme, symbole de lunivers et rceptacle du divin ; il substitue
lenceinte magique, panthon, montagne sacre, espace concentr, nuclaire,
favorable la prire et la mditation () il substitue le temps, imago mundi,
par sa version dgrade : la marelle34.
As McLuhan cites, if electric speed requires organic structuring of the global economy
quite as much as early mechanization35, Rayuelas hypertext project takes us back to
organic technologies a metaphorical wetware that overcomes the inevitable distance
Ted Nelson. Literary Machines. Swarthomre, Pa: Nelson, 1981. 2.
John Slatin. Reading Hypertext : Order and Coherence in a New Medium. Hypermedia and Literary
Studies. Ed. Paul Delanay and George P. Landow. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994. 1578.
34
In replacing the initial title : Mandala by the definitive one of Rayuela (Hopscotch), Julio Cortzar
eliminates anything excessively sacred in his novel. He renders explicit the playful axis that generates and
covers the text in its wholeness () and privileges the notion of play over that of initiatory ritual () he
replaces the centre or supreme circle, symbol of the universe and receptacle of the divine; he substitutes
the magic wall, the pantheon, the sacred mountain, the concentrated and nuclear space in favour of
praying and meditation () he substitutes time, imago mundi, by its degraded version: the hopscotch.
Sal Yurkievich. Littrature latino-amricaine: traces et trajets. Trad. Franoise Campo-Timal. Paris :
Gallimard, 1988. 243.
35
McLuhan, 1964. 306.
32
33

19
of technological men from Nature announced by Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of
Solitude. In the Garden of Forging Paths, Jorge Luis Borges constructs a hypertextual
model of the endless, unaccountable and unnameable universe in a cyclical, cosmic and
cosmopolitan temporality. It is an expressionists universe of sensations and thoughts,
of genres and characters. From the simplicity of the plot (a detective short story) we are
transported ubiquitously and alternatively to a logical and metaphysical story. It is a
playful experience built up as a mise-en-abme or a Chinese box in a continuous
temporality, gerund of modes and forms charged with Hispanic and universal
components. In this way the character-narrator tells us the story:
Despus reflexion que todas las cosas le suceden a uno precisamente,
precisamente ahora. Siglos de siglos y slo en el presente ocurren los hechos;
innumerables hombres en el aire, en la tierra y en el mar, y todo lo que realmente
pasa me pasa a m... (...) Pens en un laberinto de laberintos, en un sinuoso
laberinto creciente que abarca el pasado y el porvenir y que implicara de algn
modo los astros. Me sent, por un tiempo indeterminado, percibidor abstracto del
mundo36.
Borges proposition rediscovers a transversal apprehension of the world lying in
the depths of natural men. This is manifested by molecular interconnections in
changing, multiform, interactive and hypertextual entities that belong to cross-cultural,
neurological and disorganized Hispanic and Latin cultures. The Garden of Forging
Paths (1941) anticipates the arrival of digital forms that question the limits of
temporality and linear thinking. The labyrinthical structures of language are at the
centre of Borges universe, characterized by a multiplicity of games, fictions and
encyclopaedic knowledge. All of them seduce the participant with its polymorphical
configurations in the act of textual appropriation:
Borgess deconstruction of ending instigates a critique of narrative authority; it
calls into question the chain of authorial decisions that ordain one outcome at the
expense of others. Electronic hypertext treats this critique as axiomatic and
embraces a multitude of variations, among which (in principle at least) none is
privileged () the true innovation of hypertext lies not in its effect upon
authorship, but in its transformation of reading () Readers of hypertext are
already empowered to read interactively, making choices among a set of
predetermined pathways and in the process becoming acutely aware of
possibilities which the present network does not support37.
After I thought that all the things happened to oneself precisely now. Centuries after centuries and
only in the present did these things happened: unaccountable men in the air, on land and on the sea, and
everything that happens, happens to me () I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, a sinuous growing
labyrinth that will embrace the past and the future and will include all the heavenly bodies. I felt, for an
undetermined time, like an abstract perceiver of the world. Jorge Luis Borges. El jardn de los senderos
que se bifurcan. Ficciones. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2001. 102, 107.
37
Stuart Moulthrop. Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of Forking Paths.
Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Ed. Paul Delanay and George P. Landow. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The MIT Press, 1994. 124-5, 130.
36

20

Over the last twenty years, an estimated 90 percent of written language has begun to
appear in digital form. As a result, our whole psychic framework has been changing as
we use computers and internet in a non-linear hypertextual way to read and write.
Searching through the digital oceans of data alters the relationship of logic to intuition.
Emotional thinkers, as are Hispanic speakers, develop thought after verbal or written
utterances. Software restructures our thought process. We no longer formulate ideas
systematically before writing. Computer users think on the screen and write while
making changes without the fear of retyping or of making spelling mistakes, even
without the linear roles of syntax. The criticism of Truman Capote on Jack Kerouacs
On the road was a premonition of todays net generation users: He does not write, he
types. And typing is determined by the impulsive beat Julio Cortzar wrote in the
chapter 82 of Hospscotch. The notion of take, developed by Julio Cortzar in his
concept of writing was already present in the fast tempo rhythmic typing of On the
Road. Like his fictional characters, Kerouac was inspired by the beat of the heart as the
beat to keep in an environment where nobody was bored to death (which seems to hve
become the norm nowadays in many of our constipated educational and business
institutions). We would like to see the transcultural managers of our poststructuralist
organizations with the same hyper and frenzy mood38.
Typing instead of writing has become, with the help of computers, the natural
way. We express ourselves today with hybrid hypertextual cut and paste bricolage of
words typed on the computer screen of a computer with the help of the keyboard or
spit it out with a microphone, earphones and webcams. Virtual slamming as standard
emailing has become the common practice in most of our communication exchanges
with the hypermedia. The epistemological implications of computer writing make word
processing a different way of thinking. There is practically no distance between
thoughts appearing in your brain as you see them on the screen (you have to type fast or
to talk over the computer). Syntactic order is imposed after paradigmatic chaos. We are
in the wilderness of hypertext territory. We rearrange, reorganize, change and play with
our thoughts. The mystical Third Eye of Tibetan Buddhism has become the
technological eye of the screen, a virtual wire connecting our brain to the Planet. The
I shambled after as Ive been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people
for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of
everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn
like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the
blue centre light pop and everybody goes Awww!. Jack Kerouac. On the Road. London: Penguin
Books, 1972. 11.
38

21
gap between the collective oral traditions and the individualistic written practices has
disappeared. But when oral words in a literate culture have little credibility, oral
listening becomes a fundamental condition for associative thinking, a feminine quality
which searches for images rather than concepts, persons rather than names. Sense is
made and organized around vivid images acting in context39.
Emotional thinking and rhythm is synonymous to African and Latin American
cultures. Transcultural communities will have to learn to dance, to sing, to flirt (these
cultures live in a permanent state of seduction) and to compliment, even if the things
they say are not true. In general, nobody cares for the truth because what really matters
in this feeling trade type of environment is to create a friendly and jazzy
atmosphere to perform as well as possible. All of this is part of their cultural behaviour
and theatrical habits. This is their way of understand things, sensing the invisible
field. It is a kind of aurora borealis announcing with streams of light something
appearing in the collective hemisphere, the aura of our open organizations. If the
essence of the so-called Third World civilizations is based on a skin perception of
things (sensorial data), the Western understanding of these management sub-cultures
as the reservoir of telluric and spiritual knowledge has been so far very limited. Field
theory and systems thinking as part of a recent new area in physics and sciences are
trying to overcome our underdeveloped emotional skills which are a consequence of an
overconfident Cartesian (mechanistic) view of the universe. As Carlos Castaneda in The
Teachings of Don Juan as well as Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception40 wrote,
the role of psychedelic drugs, sorcerers and marabous is fundamental for the
understanding of our collective unconscious. We can imagine our open multi-ethnic
organizations of the future encouraging our transcultural managers to take ESP
Derrick de Kerckhove. The Skin of Culture. Investigating the New Electronic Age. Christopher
Dewdney, ed. London: Kogan Page Limited, 1997. 108-109.
40
As Huxley points out in his essay, In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly
educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions.
There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for
scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even is this age of
technology the verbal Humanities are honoured. The non-verbal Humanities, the arts of being directly
aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a bibliography, a
definitive edition of a third-rate versifiers ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexes any
genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support. But when it comes to finding out
how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of
inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make
ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system when it
comes to any form of non verbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical
use) than Swedish Drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do
anything about it. Verbalist are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact;
intellectuals fell that what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need
not impress us deeply. Aldous Huxley. The Doors of Perception. London: Flamingo Modern Classic,
1994. 53-54.
39

22
sessions, magic mushrooms treats yoga breaks, grass therapies, laughing and
clowning workshops, basic notions of witchery or magic tricks and other kinds of
spiritually enriching practices. If such practices have not happened yet this is due to the
still uptight white male Cartesian population. It would be much healthier than the
excessive alcoholic happy hours or the caffeine addicted coffee breaks usually taken
by members of our business companies. Everything they do is important in a time
money oriented schedule.
The members of our recent Global Village of networking organizations see
themselves as participants of a fractal event where many of the principles of chaos grow
at very different levels of interaction. The extensive computer-communication network
functions as a fractal approach to human consciousness where feedback and immediacy
are the normal responses of the cyber-participants. The indirect vision of reality through
technologies gives a different perception of time and space. The new territory of our
lives, the cyberspace (the Matrix in Gibsons Neuromancer) accelerates the emergence
of our new biotechnological bodies. The ubiquitousness and instantaneity of the
nanoworlds creates the most effective weapons of the 21st century, the
communication appliances. The Third Technological Revolution (first, the invention of
trains, plains and automobiles; and second, the computers, television and cyberspace)
are nanochips functioning as intelligent drugs being used daily by millions of
people to break down the notions of distance. The linearity of the left brain hemisphere
has been supported for centuries by the western alphabet and the straight lines of or
roads. Driving already conditions our Cartesian perception of the world. While the
monochronic behaviour of left brain traditional managers and car drivers is mostly
logical or rational, our right brain hemisphere transcultural communicators are convivial
public transit commuters in oral societies where simultaneous and transversal activities
and cultural milieu intertwine constantly in social time and space. However, revisiting
the former discussion about the closure and openness of the organizations, the
conservative and colonialist behaviour of many organizations is confirmed by a
paradoxical way the brain operates in relation to human societies:
Tribal, right-hemisphere closed cultures are holistic and entire and resistant to
penetration by other preliterate cultures. But the specialist qualities of the lefthemisphere phonetic alphabet have long provided the only means of invading
and taking over oral societies () The impact of alphabetic literacy is strong
enough not only to break the tribal bond, but to create individualized (lefthemisphere) consciousness as well () The dominance of the left hemisphere

23
(analytic and quantitative) entails the submission or suppression of the right
hemisphere.41
We could liken the right and left hemispheres of the brain with the southern and
northern hemispheres of the planet to better understand the ideological colonialist
discourse presented in most of our educational, political and economic institutions
throughout the world. On the one hand, literacy could be regarded as a process of
westernisation, and communication is taken as a sacred value in societies where
individualism isolates people from a collective endeavour. On the other hand, if writing
has become an element of integration in the quest for progress, hyper-technologies
deterritorialize textual and linear realities bringing oral practices to the forefront. The
almost illiterate Play Station net generation of youngsters is telling us something about
the artificial-literate nature of our education. Moreover, if every technical advance
involves a loss of something, we can be sure that linear narratives and organizational
practices are in a critical condition. The idea of progress could backfire as Mary
Shelleys Frankenstein warned us almost two hundred years ago about the dangers of a
techno-culture based on a linear accumulation of knowledge. This is what Paul Virilio
calls endo-colonization. It
happens when a political power turns against its own people () Totalitarian
societies colonize their own people () There is no colonization without control
of the body. We are here back to Foucault, evidently. Every time a country is
being colonized, bodies are colonized. The body of the Negro, of the slave, of
the deportee, of the inmate of the labour camp, is a colonized body. Thus
technology colonizes the world, through globalitarianism, as we have seen
earlier, but it also colonizes bodies, their attitudes and behaviours42.
This implies that transcultural communities dissent towards dominant modes of
discourse. They resist the implementation of a global habitus towards the use of
technological communication weapons.
The appearance of countercultures in the San Francisco area, not far from the
technological landscape of Silicon Valley, can help us to contextualize the neoplatonian
nature of our hypertextual networks of knowledge. The emergence of a laid-back
environmentalist generation of sarcastic psychedelic Zen explorers, anti-Establishment
and romantic bohemian was labelled as the Beat Generation. They were the only white
Americans to understand one of the most important American Cultural Revolution that
occurred in the 20th century. It was jazz. An Afro-American rebellion against the
41
42

Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. Essential McLuhan. London: Routledge, 1997. 372-373.
John Armitage, ed. Virilio Live. Selected Interviews. London: Sage Publications, 2001. 43.

24
Western Eye, against its fundamentals such as linear thinking, textual writing and
contemplating as the main sensorial source of knowledge (the Napoleonic museums are
the sacred space for their knowledge worshipers). As Camille Paglia tells us in Sexual
personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,
the west invented a new eye, contemplative, conceptual, the eye of art. It was
born in Egypt. This is the Apollonian solar disk, illuminating and idealizing ()
Egyptian images made western imagination. Egypt liberated and divinised the
human eye. The Apollonian eye is the brains great victory over the bloody open
mouth of Mother Nature43.
Bebop rhythmic improvisations take us back to nature, feminine listening and chaos.
And we worshiped with syncopated swing the immediacy of live performances. The
simulated artificialities of artefacts were overshadowed by the mystic rituals of Negro
and mestizo forgotten voices in reaction to the reactionary whiteness of modern
history without Angelitos negros (black angels). Western culture began its descent
into hell with a heretic demonised outcry (the female revolution) through the sixties.
The second American counterculture and the first global transcultural dissidency of
western values was the hippy movement.
The negative thinking of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Cioran showed this
spiritual generation of horny free-lovers other ontological possibilities for simple
living in a technological post-modern society. This generation, with the rejection of
absolute categories and the paradise of consumerism, found in the exiled scholars of the
Frankfurt School (especially Marcuse) the new gurus against a decadent western
consumerist society. The acceptance of the chaotic nature of the universe and their
pacifist attitude paradoxically resurrected the primitive vision of the founding fathers of
the Church. Like the main character in the biblical parable of Job, as enchained
Prometheus in the voracious hand of progress, the hippy movement taught us an attitude
of active resistance against the political, cultural and economic powers of the dominant
institutions. This parable has been closely studied by Toni Negri44 as a metaphor of a
radical ontological change from a heavens closed paradise of promises to an open
cross-cultural inferno of daily realities. This first downshifting generation of cultural
activists rejected the puritanical vision of work as the main value for their daily
activities. They did not see our society as a general productive synergetic network of
working organizations but as a space for pleasure, freedom and self-expression. They

Camille Paglia. Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York:
Vintage Books, 1991. 50.
44
Toni Negri. Job, la force de lesclave. Paris: Bayard, 2002.
43

25
questioned their identities as the Chosen People, looking back to European values as
an alternative way of life:
The American Dream puts an emphasis on economic growth, personal wealth,
and independence. The new European Dream focuses more on sustainable
development, quality of life, and interdependence. The American Dream pays
homage to the work ethic. The European Dream is more attuned to leisure and
deep play. The American Dream is inseparable from the countrys religious
heritage and deep spiritual faith. The European Dream is secular to the core. The
American Dream is assimilationist () The European Dream, by contrast, is
based on preserving ones cultural identity and living in a multicultural world.
The American Dream is wedded to love of country and patriotism. The
European Dream is more cosmopolitan and less territorial45.
The third generation of dissidents was also the pioneers of cyberspace. They
created the first bridges and virtual landscape architectures of our electronic
environments. It is the cyberpunk counterculture which started with the invention of
personal computers and the creation of the first digital network in San Francisco (ref.
The Well cited by Howard Reingold in Virtual Communities). Hip, downbeat, grunge,
informed, global minded, ecological, pessimistic and non-sexist, the cyberpunks lived in
Cyberia, a kind of Interzone underworld like in Naked Lunch of William Burroughs
(1959). It was a pre-cybernetic hallucinatory dimension where machines mutated into
creatures, and people, the senders, used telepathy to control their victims46. In this
novel each word or turn of phrase can lead the reader down an entirely new avenue of
thought or plot, imitating the experience of an inter-dimensional hypertext adventure.47
However, the reference book for this generation is Neuromancer, written by William
Gibson in 1984, the very same year Steve Jobs commercialised the Apple Classic
Macintosh and the mouse, an interactive tool discovered by Douglas Engelbart in the
sixties. In Neuromancer, cyberspace is The Matrix, a neo-pagan virtual chaotic shared
consciousness where cyberians interpret the development of the datasphere as the
hardwiring of a global brain48. A cyberperson is fascinated by navigational information
and searches for theories, models, icons, paradigms that help to understand the new
realities. The term comes from Wiener cybernetics and was expanded in Palo Altos
new communication theory developed by Shannon and Weaver which united molecular
thinking, quantum physics and information theory in an interactive electronic system of
Jeremy Rifkin. The European Dream. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 13-14.
David Cronenberg made an adaptation of the novel in the early nineties with the same title, Naked
Lunch. Burroughs was still alive and helped him with the screenplay. There is a close relationship
between this film and two other films of the Torontonian director: Videodrome (made in the eighties) and
one of his most recent films, ExisTenZ, an apology of video games and organic software.
47
Douglas Rushkoff. Cyberia. Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco,
1994. 174-175.
48
Rushkoff, 1994. 5.
45
46

26
collective intelligence. In this new social order, cybernauts are consider as a new
species model of human beings49, the same way transcultural individuals will be seen
as a new species model of entrepreneurial self-management in networking
organizations. Like cyberpunks, a revolutionary type of business executives will apply
Learys TQYA manifesto to the letter. As a result, the good persons in the cybernetic
society are the intelligent ones who can think for themselves. The problem person in
the cybernetic society of the 21st century is the one who automatically obeys, who never
questions authority, who acts to protect his/her official status, who placates and politics
rather than thinks independently50.
The last of the countercultures emerged in the United States in the early nineties
and has flourished in Europe for the past ten years. It is an alert, eclectic, self-confident,
internet, open-minded, chaos designer and an irreverent New Breed generation.
They are the mp3, ipod and napster addicts of our post-industrial societies. Their
philosophy is based not on political ideologies but on free and open communication
networks, chronopolitics, as the acceleration and change of their social habits and
systems of values through the use of hypermedia. Born in a transcultural territory, they
are polyglot and easily adaptable. Europe is setting the pace for the new model of
management in this 21st century while the American Dream suffers as the sons and
daughters of wealthier Americans grow up in the lap of luxury and come to feel
empowered and entitled to happiness and less willing to work hard, sacrifice, and make
something of themselves51. More concerned about the ecosystem, they protest against
the introduction of GMOs in their natural eating habits in a risk-prevention era
threatened by chemical polluting products. The New Breed is a risk-sensitive
generation that does not trust the achievements of risk-taking American
individualism. They are systems thinkers that question Newtons mechanistic views of
the universe:
The old idea that phenomena could be known by analysing the individual parts
gave way to the opposite conception that the individual parts can be
understood only by first knowing something about their relationships to the
whole within which they are embedded. In a word, nothing exists in isolation, as
an autonomous object. Rather, everything exists in relation to the other52.
We see the planet as a living creature. We evolve with the planet, the planet evolves
with us. We are the system; the system is just a web of relationships. Man does not have
Timothy Leary. Chaos and Cyberculture. Berkeley, California: Ronin Publishing, 1994. 67.
Leary, 1994. 69.
51
Jeremy Rifkin, 2004. 56.
52
Rifkin, 2004. 335.
49
50

27
to adapt to the environment. The survival of the fittest is an obsolete ideological
mechanism to justify inequality just as racism tried to justify centuries ago the
exploitation of blacks for the benefit of whites. European transcultural communities can
set the example for a new model of nature and society where everything is
interconnected for the creation of an interdependent living organism.
There is a radical change in our traditional organizations when it comes to
understanding this new model of management in an interconnected emotional,
hypertextual, Latin and even African way of thinking. Even large companies are
implementing networking attitudes amongst their white collar workers. This is the
case of Danone. A tree of knowledge has been created for their 8,400 operational
managers. To optimise the rapid reaction and performance of their 90,000 workers in a
decentralized organization spread out all over the world, Franck Mougin, Human
Resources general director, has given priority to the behaviour of the employees in
cette version latine du knowledge management () Nous avons tous dabord abord le
problme par la technologie, a na pas march, les salaris ntaient pas prts53. The
project seeks to convince all the managers to exchange ideas and findings. To
accomplish this, the company has gotten rid Power Point presentations. They preferred
the playful and entertaining video clips made by the participants relating their
experiences, accomplishments and failures within and outside the organization. There is
a giver, a taker and a facilitator to make this exchange possible between Chinese,
Italian and Argentinean managers for example. In this way, they can share their
professional and personal knowledge. The givers give a presentation to the takers in
an organized chaos. The participants have to simulate certain cross-cultural situations,
getting even specifically dressed for the occasion. The company created 85 expertise
units to coach an heteroclite universe where hierarchy and power control are much less
important than solidarity and sharing attitudes/behaviours within cultural and
multidisciplinary disparity. The transcultural behaviour of our organization is ready for
interaction. The organizations will just be an extension of their enthusiasm and
motivation. So let the show begins!

this latin version of knowledge management () We first faced the problem by technology, but it did
not work. Our workers were not ready. Sandrine LHerminier. Danone incite ses salaris changer
leur trsors de connaissances. La Tribune. Mercredi 20 avril 2005. 30.
53

28

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