Traveling Theory or Kiao-Iing? Said, Lukacs, and the Transcultural Transmission of Thought-tools = Traveling Theory or Kiao-Iing? Said, Lukacs, and the Transcultural Transmission of Thought-tools

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Based on his travels across the Middle East and eventual exile in North America, Edward Said makes many assertions on those migrations between ideas and theories, later developed into his popular theoretical model which he terms his “Traveling Theory.” Taking Said’s theoretical inventions into account, this essay re-reads Georg Lukacs so as to speculative on new possibilities for the transmission of ideas into theories, and theories across cultures. Re-reading Said’s Traveling Theory against the grain of what I frame as “Kiao-Iology” (which draws on theoretical resources from Chinese traditional culture, so as to propose a unified schemata of Eastern thinking), this paper seeks to unfold the possibilities for a resituated inter-cultural dialogue, casting new light onto how humans make particular knowledge products (cultural, spiritual, ideological). Through an extra-spatial Kiao-Iological framework, knowledge products can then mutate into new shapes and new tropes when crossing over into newer culturally-situated contexts. In an era of mass production and globalization, this may well be a theory for the times. I seek here to unfold new possibilities for modeling how cross-cultural dialogue takes place, which I hope can provoke new ideas toward thinking on how ideas transmit both spatial-synchronically (that is, within each generation and across cultures) and temporal-diachronically as intergenerational, mobile, historically mutating modes.