Page 177 - Contribution To Phenomenology

170 ALOIS MICKUNAS

that assume a sacral spatio-temporal loci of ancestral blood and land.
Their exclusiveness will tend to spht any presumed national imagery and
create, in the area of symbolic designs, all sorts of animosity and division.
Those emergent nationaUsms, that fall within these parameters, will not
create an imaginary nation sufficiently pliable for survival.
The imagery of cultural nationalism in a modernizing context is best
served by postmodern sensitivities capable of traversing various institu-
tions, cultural practices, and archaizations, finding among them un-
suspected resonances in ways that access the same old things in novel
modes. Such accesses do not get absorbed into one or another cultural
mode, as would be the case with structuralism, but comprise a non-reduc-
tive mutual enrichment. In this sense, while the process of globalizing
may proliferate communicative means, such means are also accessible to
national cultures and their mutual dialogue, not as a universal discourse,
but as an establishment of resonances among differences that open
common concerns beyond the globalizing praxis. Such concerns can begin
at the national-global intersections—the environment, peace, human rights,
nutrition, health—by allowing each national culture to articulate such
concerns by finding, in turn, other concerns that may resonate with totally
different questions of diverse national cultures. Once again, such
postmodern resonances cannot be absorbed fully without trace into one
or another national culture; each encounter leaves a residuum of com-
monality and difference, and can thus be counted upon to form
integration without imposed or reductive wholeness. No claim is made
concerning a protracted abihty of the postmodern aspect of modernizing
cultures to have the staying power and critical stamina for a continuous
discovery and maintenance of requisite intra-cultural and cross-cultural
resonances. Yet in the current context of modernizing globalism, it is the
sole facet that emerged with modernity capable of fulfilling this function
of integral differentiation.^

^ Anthony Smith, NationaUsms in the Twentieth Century, 84; Jean Gebser, Ursprung
und Gegenwart (Stutgart: Deutsche Verlags-anstalt, 1966).