The Space of In-Betweenness: Engaging Incommensurability as an Intercultural Heuristic

This essay engages the idea of “incommensurability” as a reflexive attunement to recognizing cultural differences as simultaneously non-equivalent and non-hierarchical. Specifically, we approach incommensurability as a response to commensurability, which we understand as a difference-as-problem assumption undergirding colonial modes of thinking within/beyond intercultural communication inquiry. By reviewing several frameworks that inform a politics of difference-in-commune, we identify two dimensions of incommensurability to articulate the space of in-betweenness that merits further intercultural communication theorizing: (a) the critical oppositional personal-identitarian thesis, and (b) the critical oppositional relational-communal thesis. In short, incommensurable difference should be understood as a site of nourishment rather than a deficit.