Page 173 - Contribution To Phenomenology

166 ALGIS MICKUNAS

above all the destinies of individuals and groups. It may possess an
actively shared language that lends itself to creation of a spontaneous
collective consensus for mutual living. The sharing of public institutions
for a common purpose constitutes a basis of mutual respect among the
members of such a community." The nation is thus an invention, even
if in some instances it is formed by ethnic imposition—as was the case
of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. Nonetheless, even in these cases the
nation was premised on a conception of cultural identity with strong or
weak celebrations of its founding: great achievements, sacrifices,
monuments, artworks, and psychological designs built to exhibit and
enhance all these. Indeed these cultural productions are imaginatory
variations of the continuous inventions of a nation.
It would seem that the current turmoil, the political rhetoric—in the
face of the lack of imaginatory creativity on the right—are bland efforts
to continue the invention of the American nation. Yet comparative
cultural studies suggest that a replacement of the cultural sphere by
political rhetoric, leading to a conflation of politics and culture, comprises
the greatest danger to others and one's own efforts to constitute and to
revive a nation. This conflation might create an appearance that political
rhetoric is capable of dynamizing nationalism, yet it becomes a contentless
separation of the population on an ideologically fragmented battleground
that reduces both the ideologies and the population to the modernistic
level of practical interests. These, clearly, abolish national culture in favor
of globalization. Neither corporations nor the workers find any allegiance
to any nation. Zenith is pleased by the cheap labor in Taiwan, while
Zenith workers who have lost jobs are more than happy to get jobs with
Nissan. Here one becomes a subject not of a nation but of a global
corporation whose loyalties are to global markets; the homogeneity of
making and technical magic are predominant.
While nationalisms that conflate culture and politics, and even conflate
nationalism with archaization, may lead to the aboUtion of the nation and
to an institution of totaUtarianism, democracies have an advantage insofar
as they disconnect culture from poUtics. In this way, cultural symbolic
designs resist—and even oppose—the efforts of political and ideological
encroachments. If such enchroachments occur, various results follow. First,

" Anthony Smith, Theories of Nationalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); O.
G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verson, 1983).