Karl Marx was the first theorist to attempt to analyse modern and postmodern societies. According to Marx, the capitalist mode of production helped to create a new form of modern society. This new form of modern society was built around the production of commodities and the collection of capital. According to Marx, capital created its own world and the commodities that were created became a norm of social organization (Best and Kellner, 1997). Capitalism has become a norm within society due to the attachments that society has given it. The object world is in command and human well-being is expressed by the evident consumption of goods. Critical thought no longer exists as it is oppressed by the culture of mass obedience. This essay will discuss three Marxist critics Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and Fredrick Jameson and their response to postmodernism.
Guy Debord was a Marxist critic who
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Jameson was a sceptic towards metanarratives as a mode of experience. He believes in grand ideas that have been developed from intellectual effort inflicted by the late capitalist mode of production. Jameson also claimed that postmodernity is characterised by pastiche and a crisis in historicity. Categorizing history eliminates difference and foresees the idea that the historical period is consistent. Postmodernism is not a style but a cultural dominant. The traits of postmodernism are seen as the norm within society. It is a notion that allows all different and inferior features within society. Older modernism was seen as ugly, obscure and anti-social. Jameson also claimed that there was a mutation within the cultural sphere that declared the attitudes within older modernism as outdated. Jameson states that the ideas of older modernists are not seen as outdated anymore, that they are rather realistic. This shift is a result of adoration and academic institutionalisation of the modern movement (Jameson,