Page 170 - Contribution To Phenomenology
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CULTURAL LOGICS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES 163
It has been noted that modernity contains its antimodernism. While
the latter is parasitic on modernity, it cannot form any ties with
nationalistic archaizations, since it does not contain any unifying principle
and cannot offer ritualistic resistance against modernization. Although our
previous discussion painted postmodernity as an undisciplined process of
accepting a modern arbitrary signification, it can become self-conscious
of its own mature abihty to establish connections among various analytical
fragments of modernity not by positing an encompassing discourse, but
by tracing resonances among institutions and disciplines of modernity.^ At
this level of postmodern awareness, it may be possible to regard the
postmodern awareness of modernity as a nexus among various facets,
the discrete components, of modernization and nationalistic archaization.
Such a bridge comprises diverse resonances that can find connections
unnoticed by modern analysis. Thus one can find legahsms in scientific
language, hidden valuations in positivistic philosophies, salvific rhetoric
in secular politics, and capitalist economies in the fundamentalist
promises.
Given these relationships, we can enunciate the current factors that
appear within and in face of Western modernity: there is the
modern-antimodern crisis, requiring their mutual impUcation and mutual
exclusion; there arise the archaic moves as nationalistic and/or ethnic
searches for identity that may be the inner disruptions of modern
homogenization, its inner threats that constantly promise a protective
enclave of sacral unity and archaic identity against the winds of
self-reUance and autonomy. Then there are the partial mythical univer-
saUties with claims to salvific transcendence. The antimodernity, as we
saw, rejects the presence in archaization, the representational subject, and
even signitive processes. As a result, postmodern awareness takes the
modern facets and traces their resonances and intersections, without
positing a necessary continuity among them. It is of note that each facet
resonates with and incorporates differently the facets of other modes of
consciousness into systems of shifting networkings which, in their
openness, make incomplete sense. Thus the archaic level, while surpassed
and fragmented, is traceable in the specific hierarchy of modernizations,
at least in symbohc designs. For a particular hierarchy to be vaUd within
^ Hans Bertens, "Die Postmoderne und ihr Verhaeltnis zum Modernismus," in Die
UnvoUendetervemunft: Modeme versus Postmoderne hrsg. Dietmar Kamper und Willem
van Reijen, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 46-98.

