Friday, November 03, 2000

Reflecting Eagleton: Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Reflecting Eagleton: Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

The Modern

The avant-garde culture which dominated Modernism attempts to reintegrate art into political life to achieve socio-political ends, a socialist future in which art and society achieve a mutual enlightenment. In this sense the present – the actuality – of the subject is merely a dislocated future which exists simultaneously as now and to come. History then becomes a rupture in temporality (re: Cubism, montage in cinema) rather than a linear narrative.

Modernism resists commodification by rejecting the bourgeois forms and tropes of representation in favour of the less consumable and non-representational: surrealism; dadaism; serialism; the theoretical (or academic) enfranchisement of form and structure as reified, for example, in the work of the Cubists, the neoclassicists, and musique-concrete. In this regard, “Modernism refuses to abandon the struggle for meaning” while simultaneously attempting to continually re-localize sites of meaning away from itself. It thus denies the self of its referent (object; “I am art”) while simultaneously glorifying the self which enacts the representation (object[strikeout word]; “I am the gesture of art”) in a performative manner.

The utopia envisioned by the Modern aesthetic was checked by elements of late capitalism which institutionalized and commodified its once revolutionary gestures. “High modernism ... was born at a stroke with mass commodity culture”; it resists commodification, but that very gesture of resistence is itself institutionalized as commodity. In protesting bourgeois elitism in art and politics, modernism attempted to remove itself from general social practice (re: mass commodity culture) and thus reiterated the isolationism and elitism it strove to overcome. It became a fetish, the singular ‘collectable’ in both its materiality and its existence as image.

The Postmodern

Artistic expression within postmodern culture is “the dissolution of art into the prevailing forms of commodity production”. It is not simply l’objet d’importance in its material form, but rather the gesture of its presentation is its ontology. Thus, Eagleton expands upon Jameson’s belief that pastiche is the mode of postmodern art by reclaiming parody as a equal structural element. Po-mo art reiterates the tropes of modernism but moves their political implications. No longer is the alienation of the human subject the dominant theme of art, as such remains tied to tradition metaphysics which correlates an a priori gesture of transcendence with all human endeavour. Consequently there can not be an attribution of value to representation; rather value is a subjective concept which must remain in relation to the art object and not an element of the object itself.

The commodification of art reflects the aestheticization of the commodity; art and political life return to the pragmatic from their theoretical plateaux. Since the modernist project was itself subsumed by commercial culture, then the postmodern project will reposition itself in a pre-emptive manner within capitalist discourse; “only that which is already a commodity can resist commodification. If the high modernist work has been institutionalized within the superstructure, postmodernist culturewill react demotically to such elitism by installing itself within the base”. Thus simple valuation of bad and good – high contra low art – is deemed obsolete; the historical process and any notions of aesthetic value which are its consequence must be forgotten, while simultaneously its forms and tropes are themselves consumed and reused by postmodern expression.

“From modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, but eradicates all critical distance from it, countering this with a poker-faced presentation of ‘bizarre’ experiences which resemble certain avant-garde gestures”. The postmodern project wrongly assumes the end of representation to signify the death of truth, and thus a multiplicity of truths can co-habitate.

The postmodern subject oscillates between the interiority of its individuality and its citizenship amongst a faceless mass.