Intercultural competence and the promise of understanding

Abstract

In this chapter I adopt an interdisciplinary approach in the form of a philosophical investigation into the epistemological assumptions of the concept of competence and the ethical implications for intercultural dialogue. I intend to argue that the notion of culture represents an ‘essentialist trap’ that fails to account for the complexity that characterizes intercultural exchanges. Thus, in this paper I shift the focus from culture to the ‘inter’ of the intercultural, indicating the process of interaction in communication. From this perspective, I illustrate the notion of promise and I introduce the metaphor of the promise of understanding to critique the epistemological underpinnings of the notion of intercultural competence as it is presented in two frameworks that are paradigmatic of current thinking in intercultural research: the pyramid model and the Intercultural Competence for Professional Mobility (ICOPROMO) project. Through this critique, I introduce the idea of a deferred promise of understanding as a guiding principle for intercultural communication.This notion of promise is complemented by Levinas’s (1998, Otherwise than being.) formulation of subjectivity which provides an account of the relationship between self and other that informs a dialogic, ethical and open-ended understanding of communication in the form of presence to one another as corporeal, embodied subjects who co-construct meanings. Finally, I sketch an alternative understanding of competence that relies on an idea of communication aligned to a Levinasian interpretation of the ethical which is more closely connected to the experiential sphere and the bodily aspects of lived human subjectivity. In conclusion, this chapter emphasizes the characteristics of complexity, contingency and the power relations embedded in communication as constituent of interculturality.