The last session I attended at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas was about agitators. It was political rather than philosophical, which is a pity given that the Festival worked in terms of a modernist discourse in opposition to a postmodern one. The borders had to be sealed as across the border lay irrationality.

Now postmodernism constitutes a general attempt to transgress the borders sealed by modernism, to proclaim the arbitrariness of all boundaries, and to call attention to the sphere of culture as a shifting social and historical construction. We now live in societies where the cultural sphere is becoming more and more important, overwhelmed with meanings for the unanswerable questions of identity and cultural difference. This development after the "cultural turn" call for a dynamic, interactive, plural and always changeable understanding of culture. So we have crossover, patchwork and organic hybridization that are unavoidable for any cultural development.

This way of thinking is a very unique experience for Western modernity, which is obsessively based on the recognition of the “either-or” principle and its violent outcomes. For the first time in Western cultural history, the idea of intermingling seems not to be connected with fear, devaluation, inferiority, sin or cultural crisis.

The concept of hybridity offers us a different approach to culture and society, because it disrupts the longing for homogeneity in colonial modernity and rethinks difference differently. Hybridity refers to a different cultural cartography of the world that is much more based on impurity and in-between categories. This is why hybridity serves as multi-layered scheme in a postmodern approach. As an alternative to traditional ideas of singularity and totality, hybridity highlights the irreducible positions of difference and diversity. Instead of binary patterns it prefers the liminal concepts of third spaces and border transgression. It thus celebrates the dynamic of mixture and intermingling.