Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism Eagelton’s essay, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism , was first published in the New Left Review in 1983 in which his post Marxist analysis of literature is exposed. He accounts for capitalism influence on art and its role. The capitalist and late capitalist areas have seen two new forms of literature appear: modern and postmodern. The modern, Eagleton explains, â€Å"In bracketing off the real social world, establish[es] a critical, negating distance between itself and the ruling social order† [1] , while postmodern works accepts the fact 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 claim, the characteristics of modern and postmodern genres will be analysed, so as to understand literature’s role. Eagleton explains how â€Å"High modernity [†¦] was born at a stroke with mass commodity culture.† [2] Capitalism, as defin ed 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 Marxist 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: â€Å"if the artefact is a commodity, the commodity can always be an artefact. â€Å"Art† and â€Å"life† indeed interbreed† [3] . Eagleton points out that that the â€Å"performative principle†, which he redefines as the deliverance of goods, also applies to the capitalist conception of art. The use of â€Å"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 so ciety focuses on commodities sold to and ideologically integrated by the consumer: â€Å"The commodity is less an image in the sense of a â€Å"reflection† than an image of itself, its entire material being devoted to its own self-presentation† [4] . Art has become centred on its own image, role and place within society, because it has somehow lost its utopian role of mirroring the world, as if capitalism has perverted its function: â€Å"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 really mirror at all.† [5] Modernism 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 Man’s deconstructivist theory to define modernism: â€Å"Literature defines and pre-empts its own cultural institutionalisation by textually introjecting it, hugging the very chains which bind it, discovering its own negative form of transcendence in its power of literally naming, and thus partially 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 â€Å"resists commodification† [7] 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.