Modern Models of Intercultural Communication: From the Modern to the Postmodern, From the Postmodern to the Neo-modern

Abstract

The article deals with a comparative analysis of three key models of intercultural communication that have developed in the contemporary culturological discourse – dialogical, phenomenological, and critical ones. The first is identified as modern, the second is as postmodern, and the third is as neo-modern. The dialogical model is characterized by an orientation to the ontological presence of the Other as a source of self-identification. In its maximum manifestation, it leads to universalism and unification in globalism. The phenomenological model is characterized by an orientation to the ontic presence of the Other as an imaginary image. In its maximum manifestation, it leads to particularism and relativization in multiculturalism. Globalism and multiculturalism, as patterns of modernity and postmodernity, are seen as different manifestations of one concept of Western rationality, modernity, which leads to the repression of the Other. A radical break with modernity is the critical theory (Freudo-Marxism), which declares the ontological absence of the Other as the basic existential trauma of the subject in the symbolic field of culture. Through the prism of the critical model, the dialogic and phenomenological models of the Other are interpreted as projections of the desires of Ego and are deconstructed toward the detection of the original trauma. Overcoming this trauma should contribute to the removal of typical oppositions of Western society.