Cultural DNA. The Ontology of Impossible Creativity

An artist chooses oil over watercolor. A writer begins a sentence with the subject rather than a circumstance. A composer resolves dissonance into major rather than minor. Each is confident in their own choice, in their authorial decision. But where does the very desire to choose precisely this way come from? Why does oil seem more suitable for this particular conception? Why does the subject naturally take first position? Why does major resolution feel natural?

These questions expose a fundamental misunderstanding of cultural DNA’s nature. We’re accustomed to thinking of it as something that can be discovered after the fact: analyze a finished work and identify cultural markers. Like forensic investigators finding fingerprints at a crime scene. But cultural DNA is not a trace left after action. It is the action itself in its continuous unfolding.

Let’s return to the formula from the previous chapter. Consciousness operates through cultural codes. It has no other tools. So every act of consciousness reproduces cultural structures. This is reproduction, not influence. Not reflection. The distinction is critical. Influence presupposes external impact on some autonomous entity. Reflection implies passive copying. Reproduction, however, is an active process in which culture actualizes itself through specific consciousness.

The Processual Nature of Cultural DNA

Imagine a musician improvising on piano. At each moment, their fingers choose the next note from an infinite set of possible sounds. But this choice is illusory. The previous note has already created a harmonic field that makes some sounds «right,» others «tense,» still others «impossible.» These categories don’t exist in the physics of sound. They exist only in the cultural matrix that structures the musician’s perception.

What’s more, the very movement of fingers is subject to years of training, muscle memory that has fixed certain movement patterns. The musician’s breathing follows phrasing absorbed from thousands of heard works. Even the moment when they decide to break a rule, to shatter expectation? This is a culturally conditioned gesture. The very concept of violation is possible only within a system of rules.

Cultural DNA here is not something the musician «uses» or «follows.» It is the process of music-making in its wholeness. To stop this process would mean stopping consciousness itself. Even silence between notes is culturally marked. It’s not absence of sound but a musical pause, having duration, place in metric structure, dramaturgical function.

The processuality of cultural DNA means its totality. There is no moment when consciousness functions outside cultural codes, to then turn to them. Waking in the morning is already structured by cultural expectations of the day. The first thought is formulated in linguistic categories. The sensation of one’s own body passes through the cultural schema of corporeality: what’s normal, what requires attention, what’s shameful, what’s pleasant.

This continuity makes cultural DNA invisible to its bearer. A fish doesn’t notice water until pulled onto shore. But for consciousness there is no shore. There is only transition from one cultural water to another. At the moment of transition, what becomes visible is not culture in general but the difference between cultures. A Japanese person first arriving in Italy acutely senses the Italian-ness of gesticulation, loudness of conversation, invasion of personal space. But they sense this through the prism of Japanese restraint, which at this moment also becomes visible: as absence of gestures, quiet voice, maintenance of distance.

The process of reproducing cultural DNA doesn’t require conscious participation. Conscious attempts to control it usually lead to breakdowns. A writer too carefully watching each word loses liveliness of style. A dancer thinking about each movement loses grace. Cultural DNA works best when it works automatically, when consciousness is completely identified with the process.

This explains why great works are often created in a state of flow, when the authorial «I» seems to step back, and creativity happens by itself. What steps back is not the «I» but the illusion of control. Culture gets the opportunity to actualize itself unimpeded through the given consciousness. The less resistance, the purer the manifestation of cultural DNA, the more powerful the work.

The Fundamental Distinction from Style

Here we must draw a critical distinction. Style and cultural DNA are not synonyms, not different names for the same phenomenon. Confusing them leads to fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of cultural conditioning in creativity.

Style is a set of conscious and semi-conscious choices forming a recognizable manner. A writer can decide to write in short sentences like Hemingway, or in long periods like Proust. An artist can choose Van Gogh’s palette or Vermeer’s technique. These choices form the stylistic surface of a work.

But beneath style always lies cultural DNA: the deep structure that makes these very choices possible and meaningful. Hemingway could choose short sentences only because the English language and American cultural matrix make such brevity expressive. In Japanese with its system of politeness and indirectness, the same brevity would read as rudeness or incompleteness.

Consider a concrete example. A contemporary Russian poet decides to write in the style of Japanese haiku. They observe the formal structure: three lines, image of nature, moment of illumination. This is a stylistic choice, and it can be executed masterfully. But cultural DNA will manifest in what the poet doesn’t choose consciously: in the very understanding of nature as an entity separate from humans (alien to traditional Japanese worldview), in striving for metaphorical depth where a Japanese person would see simple statement, in inevitable literariness where there should be everydayness.

Style can be imitated. A talented parodist can reproduce any writer’s manner so the reader won’t immediately distinguish parody from original. But cultural DNA cannot be imitated. It either is or isn’t. A European, no matter how many years they live in Japan, how well they master language and customs, will create works with European cultural DNA showing through Japanese stylistics.

This is not a question of quality or authenticity. A European’s work in Japanese style can be beautiful, can even reveal something new to Japanese people in their own tradition. But it will carry a double cultural signature: Japanese at the level of style and European at the level of deep structure. And this is precisely what makes such works especially interesting. They expose usually hidden cultural mechanisms through their collision.

Style can be eclectic, assembled from different sources. Postmodernist artists consciously mix styles of different epochs and cultures, creating collages and palimpsests. But cultural DNA remains unified. It’s the DNA of postmodernist Western culture, for which such mixing is a natural gesture.

Beyond this, the attempt to get rid of style, to create something stylistically neutral, only more clearly manifests cultural DNA. Minimalist architecture, striving for universality of pure forms, bears the distinct stamp of Western modernism with its faith in rationality, functionality, progress. The white cube of the gallery, intended to be a neutral background for art, is a product of a specific cultural matrix where art is understood as an autonomous sphere, separated from everyday life.

Multilevel Architecture of Manifestation

Cultural DNA doesn’t manifest at just one level of a work. It permeates all levels simultaneously, from choice of material to structure of meaning. This multilevelness makes it inescapable. Even if one manages to control one level, others continue transmitting cultural codes.

Let’s begin with the material level. The choice of medium is already culturally conditioned. Oil painting appeared at a specific moment in European history and carries a whole complex of cultural meanings: individual authorship, uniqueness of the original, museum value. Even when a contemporary Chinese artist paints in oils, they enter into dialogue with European tradition. Their choice of oil instead of ink is a cultural gesture that would have been impossible before China’s encounter with the West.

At the level of composition, cultural DNA manifests in the organization of elements. Western painting organizes around central perspective, a single viewpoint, reflecting the cultural matrix of the individual subject looking at the world as object. Traditional Chinese painting uses mobile perspective, where the viewer travels through the painting, corresponding to a different understanding of human-world relations.

Temporal organization also carries cultural signature. Western music is built on linear development from beginning to climax and resolution. Indian raga unfolds cyclically, without clear beginning or end. These differences are not stylistic but structural, reflecting different understandings of time in cultures.