9. Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

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9. Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism r jo Aga,inst the Grain nothing in them: 'That's bombast;that's Hitler and Mussolini.'8r 9. His aim in philosophy, he remarks in the Inaestigations,is to 'teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to some- thing that is patent nonsense' (464): to demystify bombast, to Capitalism,Modernism return fiom the slippery ice where we cannot walk to the rough and Postmodernism ground. Bertolt Brecht, in conversation with Walter Benjamin, referred to fascism as the 'new ice age'. The icy language of metaphysics, which includes the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, produces a picture which 'held us captive'. Who is held captive here? 'Russell and the parsons have done in{inite harm, infinite harm.' But not only Russelland the parsons. Does Wittgenstein make reparation in the Inuestigations for the metaphysics, including the Tractatu.s,which have helped to hold captive Antonio Gramsci? 'What is your aim in philosophy? - To shew In his article 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late way out of the fly-bottle' (3og). Who is this fly the fly the Capitalism' (New Left Reaiew r46), Fredric irgues that he to be let out? Jameson imprisoned in a fly-bottle, and how is pastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate modJof post- tis, modernist culture. 'Pastiche', he writes, like parody, the imitation.of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead languffl$ut it,is e_39-gggl_glgt{e of such.nl_q}_iq,fy, without a.ry oT parody;s ulterior morives, amputated of the satiric impuise, devoid of' laughter and of any convicrion that alongside the abnormal tongue-you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.'This is an excellent point; bur I wint to (r!41- t:fl-g.r. herelrlrL that rr4rvs/ ofur ad s.o1tsurl ts Ilot wnolly allen to lne '6!or .pargcly .ip_ttq.-r*ry.lgl"ly_. 31|9q_1o cultureSIg 9{f,99![gggr.rr{m,of though it is-n6ione ofwhiCh it could-the sardto be particularlyconscious. What is parodiedby post_ modernistl^--:^. culrure,^..t.---^ with--:-r its!-- dissqlqti-o,pl: r - of atgln-_t-o_gh. preyftine'1.,.: f"p_"f .*gllunqdtrJ-Brsd"A6n,it;el}i- ii_iriii." rf,. i"u; l :!9l3Iy-i"I-:9J . tlS -rryslggJ'--."er t-urJl-ara.n-t€a:-de. I t is as though posrnioilernism is among other things a sickjoke at the expense of such revolutionary. qy_4ql:safdiim, ond of whose major im-pulses,as'{e_ter.Brirge{has convincingly argued in his Theory of the Auant-Garde, was fo dlC"fAUde;tie_.Gstitutional autonomy of art, erase the frontiers between culture and ooli_ 'tical socrety and iliurrl a9q!!q,re--pfg{"g!r9_{l- !o itl _b_qnble. unprlvtte.gect,ptace rvlr.htn^soclalplgqr_i-c.s as a whole., In the commodrfied artelacts of postmodernisml the a-vant-gardist dream of an integration of art,and society returns in mon- strously caricatured form; the tragedg of a Mayakovskyis plaved through- once more, but thi3 time'asLfarq.. lt is i, thougt rlF postmodernism represents the !/nical belated revenge wreakEd r t2 Against the Gratn postmodernism Capita,lism,Modernism and r 3 j by bourgeois culture upon its revolutionzrry antagonists,whose utopian desire fbr a lusion of art and social praxis is seized, things are what they are,inrrigui.gly sell-identical,urterly sh.r-rr distorted and jeeringly turned back upon them as dystopian of cause, motive ratificaticrn; preserves this 'r fostmoclernism reality. Postmodernism, from this perspective,mimes the fbrmal self-identity, but erases its modernist scandalousness.The <li_ resolution of art and social life attempted by the avant-garde, lemma .f David Hume is surpassedby a simple c'nflati.n: fact r,r while remorselesslyemptying it of its political content; Maya- kovsky's poetry readings in the factory yard become Warhol's sha shoesand soup-cans. I say it is as th,oughpostmodernism eff'ects such a parody, dissolveinto social life, turns out, it would reed, t.t have beeri :, true prophet- of late capitalism: becauseJameson is surely right to claim that in reality it is by-anticipating such a desirt:, sometimes blankly innocent of any such devious satirical im- bringing it about with premarure'e hasre,haste, iate late irpitalismcapiralism d_e{ilvdefilv pulse, and is entirely devoid of the kind of historical memory inverts its own logic ainrs that if the artefacr_is:r which might make such a disfiguring self-conscious.To place a pile of bricks in the Tate gallery once might be considered ironic; to repeat the gesture endlesslyis sheer carelessnessof any upon a commodity fbrm which is already invesredwith aesthetir such ironic intention, as its shock value is inexorably drained allure, in a sealedcircle. The eschaton,it would appear, is alrearly away to leave nothing beyond brute f'act. The depthless, style- here under our very noses,but so pervasiveand'immediate as rir less,dehistoricized, decathected surfaces of postmodernist cul- be invisible to those whose eyesar-e still turned stubbornlv awlrv ture are not mearlt to signily an alienation, for the very concept to the past or the future. 'Ihe of alienation must secretly posit a dream of which productivist aesthetics of the early twentieth-centurv Ufheqti-qity .representation' posfffinism finds quite'unintelligible. Those flaifened sur- avant-garde spulned the notion of artistic foi faces and hollowed interiors are not'alienated' becausethere is an art which would be less' ti,rrr no longer any subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienated ald o,rgaqizing folce.'f he aesrheticsof' postmocle..ris* Flior k from, 'authenticity' having been less rejected than merely ftrr- parody of such anti-representationalism: if art no longer re_ gotten. It is impossible to discern in such fbrms, as it is in the flects, it is not because it seeks to change the world rathEr tharr artefacts of modernism proper, a wry, anguished or derisive mimic it, but because there is in tru-th nothins there to lrt. awarenessof the normative traditional humanism they deface. r.eflelte{ ry_realiyjhich (., If depth is metaphysical illusion, then there can be nothing simulacrum,gi alifffier- 'superficial' about such art-fbrms, fbr the very term has ceased vasrvelycommocrrhed rs t. say thar it is alwaysalreadv'aestheti(.' to have fbrce. Postmodernism is thus a grisly parody of socialist - textured, packaged, fetishized, libidinalized; and' for arr l() utopia, having abolished all alienati<ln at a stroke. Ey rglsing reflect reality is then for it to do no more than mirror itself, in ;r alienation to tlie second power, alienatinir'us even frffitfiown cryptic self-ref'erentiality which is indeed one o{' the innrosl ize that u structures of the commodity felish. fne_crunrrroO.rfy_lqJess lrrl i@ a 'reflection' than an image oflGelf, irs entire material bein ;,, k. Reification, once it has ex its empiie across the whole of'social reality, effaces anti-r the very criteria by which it can be recognized fbr what it is and late ca so triumphantly abolishes itself, returning everything to nor- ob{ects'If the unreality of rhe artistic image mr-iiiffi-lTG trrr- mality. The traditional metaphysical mystery was a question of reality of its societyas a whole, then this is t<lsay that it mirr.r.s depths, absences,foundations, abysmal explorations; the mys- nothing real and so does not really mirror at ;ll. Beneath this tery of some modernist art is just the mind-bending truth that paradox lies the historical truth that the very autonomv an(l brute self-identity of the postmodernist arrefact is the effLct .l i€E@;. t I Capitalism, postrnod,ernism l r j4 Against the Grain Modernism and r jZ reproduction. We are all, its thorough integrationinto an economic system where such auton- simultaneouslyand inextricably, mod_ ernisrs and traditionalists. omy, in the form of the commodity fetish, is the order of the day. terms which fo. a.-Uur;;rl;;;;. neither cultural movements To seeart in the manner of the revolutionary avant-garde, not nor aesthetic ideologies ;;;rh.";;;y o.f that duplicitous phenomenon, as institutionalized object but as practice, strategy, performance, :. "^.,_y1. alwa'ysi. u"J ume slmultaneously, qamed literature, ""t "f production: all of thii, once agaifilTgrott6QGly c?Tica-tui&I by ' where this common di_ t.,T:i. u r".Jf with rhetorical self_consciousness. Iate capitalism, for which, as Jean-FranEois Lyotard has pointed lqy:.r, Literary nlsrory nere, de Man contends, .could out, the'performativity principle' is really all that counts. In his in fact be paradigmatic for.history in general,; Condition, Lyotard calls attention to capitalism's and what this means, translated from The Postmodern cle-Manese, ls that though we will never abandon our radical political illusions (the fond oft fantasy of emanciputi'n o,,.r.1u., rrom rradrtlon and conlronring the real eyeball_to_eyEball as it beirrg, It is were,a pe.rmanentpath"orogicut ttlt. ;i;#;;"ir"i.ri *h6evJr is wealthiest has the best dhance of being right.'2 such acrions to see relation between the philosophy ofJ. L. will alwaysprove self_defeating,will ,i;;;;'^;; not difficult, then, incorporaredby rsl{, or between the various neo-Nietzscheanisms of !r a historywhich has foreseerr'it._ Austin and upon them asruses ""J?.L.a a post-structuralist epoch and Standard Oil. It is not surprising t, own self-perpetuation-ifr. a".ffi 'radical' recourse to tlNietzsche, itr that classicalmodels of truth and cognition are increasingly out that'is tL ,uy, turns out to land li beratr)emocrar of favour in a society where what matters is whether you deliver :::, 1i-i :,i:1.:ly position,*.yty r."ptt*i U,ri ge_ntallytolerant of the the commercial or rhetorical goods. Whether among discourse radical antics of the young.
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