Postmodernismn
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Introduction
Karl Marx in the first few pages of Capital observed that commodity at first sight can be seen as very trivial thing however there is no doubt that commodity as the desanctified “object” of consumption lies at the heart of capitalist society which leads to departure for elaborating the complex matrix of capitalism development.
The key idea of the �commodity’ is that of exchange value, so commodities are items that can be exchanged for other items. An objects nature as a commodity doesn’t come from the truth that people have made it nor that it is useful. For Marx the central problem with �commodity’ is that the labour involved in the production is unseen, so that the consumer sees a thing as something they want supposed to something made as a product of someone’s labour. All societies produce useful goods but this does no make all good commodities. When labours produce hard working goods for the �market’ the value of those goods is not set by their usefulness, but by their ability to be exchanged for other.
However in today’s world out of all the commodities, the fashion object appears to be the most superfluous and trivia because;
“Fashion has this ephemeral, volatile existence that it become the exemplary site for exploring the dominant tendencies and contradictions of our late capitalist, consumer or postmodern society ”
(Gail Faurschou,1990 p234 Postmodernism Philosophy)
Having seen how the production of fashion surpass it earlier goal of satisfying needs of a modernizing society, it is now compelled to drive consumption to new extremes of insatiability. Fashion is what has become the propelling drive it is the dominant mode of consumption itself instituting itself as the universal code so to speak, which all over previous cultural codes are subsumed. Postmodernity then can be seen as its purest stage, one in which fashion now increasingly represents the dominant expressions of the commodity form.
In a symbolic world of sighs is seen as a endless process, postmodernism is the dead world of objects become fashion-conscious but as far as these so called objects go, we do know that there has never been a society that has been satisfied with their sheer instrumentality. Objects allow us to tell stories and due to this we endow them with meaning or become attached to them and in some cases deliberately destroy them.
But from Marx we know that all value is social and objects acquired it on the basis of relation through which we exchange them.
Baudrillard was a theorist that revealed the logical distinction between symbolic and sighs exchange stating that the symbolic order generally refers to social relations of the “concrete”, “organic” community, which the commodity form value dominates social exchange. A good example of symbolic objects that we are familiar with today would be the wedding ring. The person that is wed does not where several nor do they think about substituting it for the next. This is due to the mutually exchanging in the ceremony that seals a relation of obligations and commitment. With commodity however it’s a totally different kind of story. The exchange of commodities in capitalism, now mediated through the market however this can only take place on the basis of exchanging values, but because of the strictly quantitative exchange relation in effect it only just allows for any symbolic investment or generation meaning to be set.
If however we were concerned here only with the most basic utilities of objects then the problems posed by the separation of moments of exchanged and consumptions would not give rise to the complexities that it does.
So does this mean that anything at all is established, gratified or completed in this celebrated moment of consumption?
It is the social relation, the act of exchanging which symbolically invests the objects.
If capitalism is a society in which objects have now become goal then commodity find its symbolism from somewhere in a way that hides the instrumentality to all these social relations of capitalist society.
So to sum up it up the basic thought, is that the commodity must import from some other source, one necessarily outside capitalism exchange relation hence as we shall see that fashion unearths history, non capitalist or “exotic” societies. What we should all be aware of here is that the process of obscuring symbolic divestment by reapromanding the symbol as a sign should not be thought as a cover up solution to an regrettable side effect of capitalisms logic. The death of symbol is the requirement needed for its birth as a sign of commodity. Marx pointed out how all existing connections, blood ties ect must be dissolved or excluded from the production process to create “free”, “autonomous” laborer. So Like wise it is only by liberating itself from the specificity and concreteness of symbolic exchange that the sign can become the true object of consumption, that is to say that commodity is available to any one for a price. Baudrillard explains in order to become the object of consumption the object must become a sign, externally to relation that is now only signifies.
We should try to understand that consumption is not as the consumption of objects as such, but as the idea of the symbolic relation that is allegedly expressed by the object.
So it is assumed in consumption
“…Objects are (not) mechanically substituted for an absent relation to fill a void…. They describe the void, the locus of relation, in a development which is actually a way of not experiencing it, while referring to the possibility of experience ”
(Baudrillard 1981 for a Critique of political Economy of the signs p12)
Before Baudrillard began to theorize the social dynamic of the integration consumptions in the 1960 the fist of these dual strategies of late capital, was already developed and visible. The display windows, the advertisements, the manufacturer and brand name played an essential role in imposing a coherent and collective vision, in certain cases they can mimic disorder to better seduce purchasing impulse of the consumer. But to show how consumption is an active mode of relation not