Page 176 - Contribution To Phenomenology

CULTURAL LOGICS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES 169

It seems then that a maintenance of complete modernistic nationa-
lisms requires the endurance of a multiplicity of cultural designs promoted
very strongly by the presence of postmodern culture. Given the exclusion
of its virulent stage of political correctness, postmodernism creates
psycho-social and conscious resonances that connect quite diverse cultural
phenomena without positing rules of integration and enforced unity.
Myths can resonate with anarchistic modes, jazz can become classical,
and classicism can be the paradise of advertisers. Rock can become a
cult of sensuality and resonate with mythical fever. Technocracy can
become magic, and the latter can become poUtical rhetorical theatre. It
allows an emergence of multiple discourses that find connections at levels
previously unsuspected. This leads to a language in constant and yet
recognizable transformations—not to antimodern and empty deconstruc-
tivism, but, to speak with Merleau-Ponty, to coherent deconstruction.

VI. Postscript

The globalizing mode of modern consciousness, while stemming from a
particular cultural universality, is deemed to be the most pervasive
framework of praxis. Its reductionistic tendency toward functional
efficiency and its technical reification, amoral position and presumed
neutrality would disregard nationalistic cultural diversity. Even if there
were an appearance of deference for cultural differences, it would be
coded either for efficiency in communication or as an enhancement of
production and exchange of commodities. All relevant cultural factors
would be simulacra, comprising neither nationalistic culture nor an
independent area of symbolic designs capable of influencing the structure
of the globalizing process.
The question of nationalistic fervor within monistically designed cultures
such as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, in their archaic and
absolutist stances, leads also to a leveling of cultural designs to specific
prescriptions excluding ethnic and even nationalistic identities, unless such
identities become conflated with the monistic tendencies. If such a
conflation were to include the political, then cultural designs would be
subject to unyielding theocratic and secular powers. To speak in terms
of national identity, an Islamic repubUc of Iran would be the same as
an Islamic republic of Lybia. While these monistic movements are one
form of archaization within modernizing contexts, other forms of
archaization, leading to the ethnic and racial origins, provide identities