Page 161 - Contribution To Phenomenology

154 ALGIS MICKUNAS

separate claims; they invent history as a context for articulating all
significance as human achievement; they tend to postulate various forms
of rationality, all regarded as impersonal and universal, each vying with
others to be the final logic or master discourse, proposing a universality
and an equivalent application of normative and legal rules to all social
members; then there is humanization in the sense of devising rules and
techniques for the benefit of humanity. Concurrently, such tendencies
reveal a general homogenization and fragmentation of cultural life. In
Western modernization the former assumes a specific form that allows
it to be extremely virulent in an economic domain and in the production
of technical power comprising main sources of dynamic that fuel a
conception of development and globalization. This form is the homogeni-
zation of the environment as qualitatively indifferent matter that can be
made into desired products. For Gebser this is magical awareness;
instrumental rationality can change anything into anything—as if by magic.
This leads back to the question whether cultural distinctions and diverse
modernizations can be maintained within this globalizing energy with
commodity production and exchange being its common denominator.
At the theoretical level, the conditions for homogenization are afforded
by the shift from presentational thinking—Being is present—to represen-
tational thinking—standards for Being derive from representations as
inherent in, or constructed by, the subject. One condition for homogeni-
zation, at one level of representational thinking, is a choice of quantita-
tive language, as most appropriate for the representation of reaUty. Yet
it is this choice (implicitly granting primacy to will over reason) that
allows representational, modern thought to constitute within itself its own
postmodernity. Quantitative language cannot retain its representational
character and turns out to be, in principle, signitive.^^ Signification
removes the subject from the moorings of vertical intentionality and
permits both the transformation of representations at will and the
quantitative homogenization that designates all events as equivalent and
thus transformable one into the other. The subject becomes completely
detached from the world and is posited as a source of signitive meanings.
It can float and become nomadic. The latter term—as the background of
various "discoveries" by postmodern writers—is, as a matter of fact, an
inherent aspect of Western modernity.

^^ Elisabeth StrOker, Philosophical Investigations of Space, translated by A. Mickunas
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), Part II, Chapter 2, § 4.