Page 163 - Contribution To Phenomenology

156 ALOIS MICKUNAS

conceive symbolic designs of awareness and reason to be fragmentary,
bricolagous, decentered, multi-layered and multi-perspectival, with a stress
on, and incognizant acceptance of modern, individual uprootedness. The
writings of postmodernists (which in the main confuse modern social
conditions of fragmentation and the lack of encompassing discourse with
postmodernism as a hypothesis of radical cultural transformation) tend to
embrace demands for unhindered self-expression, calls to authenticity, and
acceptance of inconsistencies of occultic movements. On the whole, these
works fail to distinguish between antimodernity and postmodernity. The
former rejects all that is affirmed in modernity, including representational
and signitive modes of thought, and is very much immersed in the
disconnected presence. It is a negative, an oppositional movement that
repudiates everything. It deconstructs all modern trends, proclaiming at
the same time, that there never were recognizable trends. Counter to
postmodernity, it also rejects signification.
Postmodernity might equally propose to reject signification, but it does
so by claiming that modern significations misrepresented and marginal-
ized different cultural designs of awareness.^^ Postmodernists, including
Foucault, admit that signification is modern, yet Foucault asserts all
discourse to be power.^^ But this is precisely what is ah*eady present at
one level of the modern metaphysics of the magic of will and technical
power. It can be argued that antimodernism also remains within the
modern system upon which it is merely parasitic. It has nothing to
deconstruct—since of itself it offers no tangible thesis. It is similar to
Hegel's charge against Fichte's movement to be free from, but not for
something. If deconstructionism were to claim that after becoming free
from all theses in order then to master all culture in its own way
unconditionally, then it would accept the autonomous will of modernity
with its nomadic power. The various movements, from postmodernities
through antimodernities, function on a background of their constantly
attacked, yet always enjoyed, egaUtarian culture of democracy with its
specific mode of modernization.

^^ Gilles DQIUZQ, L'Anti-Oepide (Paris: 1972).
^^ Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-
1977, edited by C. Gordon, translated by C. Gordon, K. Marshall, J. Mepham and K.
Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).