Postmodernism And Modernism And Capitalism

Two works which draw a relation between culture, postmodernism and capitalism, need to be read at this juncture, as they analyse the impact of the latter two on culture in a near dialectic manner, especially as they discuss the emergent form of postmodern art and culture. One being, Fredric Jameson’s work titled, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and the other of Terry Eagleton titled, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism. In Jameson’s view, with respect to postmodernity's plurality or what he calls as merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere, through the economic stronghold of a newly organized corporate capitalism; which had retained at least

The pastiche of the capitalist economy, visible through cultural symbols. Further stating the in cultural transition that High Modernism was born at a stroke with mass commodity culture; and it escaped from one form of commodification to only fall prey to another, which was - fetishism. Through the same notion of commodification and the pastiche, High Art too was removed from the realm of aesthetic autonomy to dissolve its boundaries and become coextensive with ordinary commodified life. Unlike Jameson, to whom pastiche held more weight, Eagleton explains what was ‘parodied’ by postmodernist culture. To him, postmodernism, mimes the formal resolution of art and social life attempted by the avant-garde, at the same time, as notions of relativity render various perspectives valid, it remorselessly empties it of its political content. To him postmodernism takes something from both modernism and avant-garde. From modernism it inherits the fragmentary self, but eradicates all critical distances from it. From avant-garde, postmodernism takes the dissolution of art into social life. Now what we see is a valid visual, with a lack or dilution of a satirical impulse to

To him these distinctions are or have already eroded and the images are now accepted as a reality. These images since originated in the consumer capitalist society are bound to bring about a disparity or fragmentation, leading to patterns of consumption, which become the prime parameters contributing to the formation of ones identity in the globalised world. Further the TV, becomes the motor to dissolve the difference between the hyperreal and the ‘real’ life. One of the most controversial discussions put forward by Baudrillard was through his book titled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The original French version was published in 1991, and the English translation in 1995. To him the telecast of the Gulf war seemed a perfect simulacrum, a constructed hyperreal scenario. He believed that backed with the experience of documenting the previous wars like the Vietnam War, and equipped with the knowledge or logic of simulation, the news channels were able to provide the ‘live coverage from the battlefront’. To Baudrillard this was what could be called as the ‘TV Gulf War’, questioning the very reality of the actual happening. In the introduction itself there is a clear understanding of this divide between the reality and the hyperreal simulacrum; making it clear that the book attempts to look into the question of not being for or against the Gulf War