Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

Capitalism, contemporaneity and PostmodernismEageltons essay, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism, was first published in the New Left Review in 1983 in which his post loss analysis of writings is exposed. He accounts for capitalism influence on art and its lineament. The capitalist and late capitalist areas have seen two new forms of belles-lettres come forth modern and postmodern. The modern, Eagleton explains, In bracketing off the real social world, establishes a critical, negating distance between itself and the ruling social order1, while postmodern works accepts the concomitant that it is a commodity and thus conflicts between its material reality and its aesthetic structure. Capitalism has turned art into a commodity, and after analysing this cl arrive, the characteristics of modern and postmodern genres bequeath be analysed, so as to understand literatures role.Eagleton explains how High modernity was born at a stroke with mass commodity culture.2 Capitalism, a s defined by Marx is the bourgeois doctrine by which they are in possession of the modes of production and manufacture goods, sold for a profit. According to most loss thinkers, including Eagleton, art became one of the goods that the bourgeoisie wants to monopolise, produce and sell. Art has become a commodity, dissolved into social life. Eagleton denounces the effects of late capitalism on art if the artefact is a commodity, the commodity can always be an artefact. Art and life indeed interbreed3. Eagleton points out that that the performative principle, which he redefines as the deliverance of goods, overly applies to the capitalist conception of art. The use of best seller as criteria of advertisement for literature proves that literature has become a mass commodity good.Art and literature have been influenced by some characteristics of late capitalism, such as virtual reality based on mass consumerism. Our society counselinges on commodities sold to and ideologically integr ated by the consumer The commodity is less an image in the sense of a reflection than an image of itself, its entire material being devoted to its witness self-presentation4. Art has become centred on its own image, role and place within society, because it has somehow lost its utopian role of reverberateing the world, as if capitalism has perverted its manoeuvre If the unreality of the artistic image mirrors the unreality of its society as a whole, then it is to say that it mirrors nothing real and so does not rightfully mirror at all.5Modernism and postmodernism are genres that emerged in the capitalist and late capitalist stages. They seem to have a common point to focus on their role and concentrate on self identity. Eagleton uses de Mans deconstructivist theory to define modernism Literature defines and pre-empts its own cultural institutionalisation by textually introjecting it, hugging the very bondage which bind it, discovering its own negative form of transcendence in its power of literally naming, and thus segmentially distancing, its own failure to engage in the real.6 Modernism attempts at representing the real, but cannot do so and raises a paradox it resists commodification7 but is nonetheless part of it, thus part of the social and cultural superstructure of society, which it denies. Denying being part of the capitalist mass commodity is the very core of modern failure to represent the real.Postmodernism appears as a more cynical genre. Some of its features are the blurring of boundaries, potpourri and grotesque. It does not attempt to represent the world, since it is virtual, and would thus fail to describe it. Postmodernism seems to be very different from modernism on the ground that If the work of art really is a commodity, it might as well admit it8 and become aesthetically what it is economically9. Eagleton also suggests that postmodersism aims at parodying the commodity production, without adding any sum in it if meaning was added in the pastiche, making it parody, it would serve to alienate the self from reality, and according to postmodern thought, there is no reality it can be alienated from. All these features aim at empting the social content of art.Eagleton assessed the features of literature genres characteristic of capitalist stages, in order to draw a critical and theoretical approach of literature. He seems to focus on its ideological role, which is, more than its representational value, its only role left. Modernism deconstructs the unified subject of bourgeois humanism, draws upon key negative aspects of the actual experience of such subject in late bourgeois society, which often enough does not at all correspond to the official ideological version.10 Indeed, literature acts as an ideology denouncing ideology. Capitalist ideology professes that mass consumption finally fulfils libidinal desires, when in fact, as modernism exposes, takes us away from our self and reality, from the unified subjecta harmonious societythat late bourgeoisie claims to have reached. Postmodernism, despite not embracing the reality of society, draws upon ideological inconsistencies of the bourgeois discourse, thus rendering itself ideological. It shows the incapacity of complying with the capitalist ideology the subject of late capitalism is neither simply the self-regulating synthetic agent posited by classical humanist ideology, nor merely a decentred vane of desire, but a contrary amalgam of the two.11 The impossibility for the self to comply with all its obligationsfamilial, consumering, workingin the late capitalist society is denounced by postmodernism. It seems that Eagleton places literature at the centre of ideology, as a resistance to bourgeois ideology. De man explains that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even off if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars and revolution12 literature is at the heart of our knowledge, ideologically built, and seems to remain so, decades after the end of ideology was proclaimed.BIBLIOGRAPHYModern Criticism and Theory, a Reader. Ed. D. Lodge. Eagleton, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism. Longman London and New York, 1988.1Footnotes1Modern Criticism and Theory, a Reader. Ed. D. Lodge. Eagleton, Capitalsim, Modernism and Postmodernism. Longman London and New York, 1988. p 392.2 ibidem3 Ibid. p386-387.4 Ibid. p.387.5 Ibid.6 Ibid. p.391.7 Ibid. p.392.8 Ibid.9 Ibid. p.393.10 Ibid. p.395.11 Ibid. p.396.12 Ibid. p.390.