Postmodern Capitalism

Frederic Jameson understands the “supreme feature of all the postmodernisms” to be the “emergence of a new kind of flatness of depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality” (9). Combined with his notion of the “waning of affect…of the human figure” in which “stars—like Marilyn Monroe—are themselves commodified and transformed into their own images” (11), Jameson seems to me to refer to the notion of class and the way it is treated in the postmodern, consumerist society.

Karl Polanyi, the economist and sociologist, wrote in his book The Great Transformation (1944) how the commodification of labor was a contributing factor to the rise of Western Market Capitalism. Labor, he says is a 'fictitious commodity'---it is not produced something for the purpose of being sold, it is a human being. It is only with this neglect of the human aspect of the paid wage-laborer that the free market can progress. Karl Marx, similarly, describes this concept in the form of the proletariat, a class reduced to commodity and contribution to the progress of industry. Jameson, reference as an example the art of Any Warhol, observes the commodification of the rest of society in postmodern culture. We are all on one plane of items with the potential to be sold, or, more true the definition of a commodity, produced in the first place for the purpose of making a profit.

(The Independent Group of London was among the first to explore the flattening out society, by the use of exposing the juxtification of images or simulacra, in the 1956 exhibition This is Tomorrow. This--as a tangent-- brings up another question I have about the implications in postmoderism in art vs. that which is naturalized in society. What is at stake in institutionalizing the process?)


If the commodification of the laborer is the backbone of modern capitalism, is the commodification of the movie star (and just of everything) what Jameson configures the economy of postmodern culture?


What is the status of the consumer if everything is equally commodified? What is the status of capitalism if everyone is consuming and everyone is being consumed? Perhaps I am trying to link two things that don’t fit perfectly together (will taking an MCM and SOC class on overlapping topics lead to more or less confusion?) but there seems to me to be a “strong tie” (heh) between the two studies.