(Post)Modern Materialism

While I certainly agree that Adorno and Horkheimer supply only a bleak prognosis in the section we have read for this week, I found Jameson’s take more enlightening and more useful for an engaged discussion of culture. In particular, I found his analysis more useful with regards to the ways in which economy and materialism are inextricable from culture. Initially, I was drawn to his deconstruction of the binaries of high and low culture: an opposition that I feel always plagues academics and broader misaligned notions of exclusivity in culture[1]. It is as simple as remembering that Charles Dickens was paid by the page to note the shift from mass/popular culture to high culture over the period of a hundred years or so. What Jameson then highlights is the way in which historical weight re-categorizes the intellectual and cultural value of a work of art/literature: eventually most art shifts to high culture by virtue of its age – don’t we tend to think of Andy Warhol as great art? Although, a question that has plagued us (and I suspect will continue to plague us this semester) is the question of applicability to our own cultural milieu, given the dated nature of (all?) cultural analysis. Positioning modernism as the cultural umbrella under which both high and low culture must fall creates a standard whose application to our own culture must be flawed: in a time of post-modernism (post-post-modernism?), does our cultural perspective function in the same way that Jameson saw the modernism of the 1970s operate?

Moreover, although I know very little about economics, I understand enough of the principles of capitalism and the free-market economy to suspect that mass culture (which Jameson has tied and I think is self-evidently tied with capitalism) once again operates differently in our economy than it did in the earlier stages of a culture of materialism and commodification. Jameson himself argues that “the concept of commodity introduces the possibility of…historical differentiation…of the aesthetic experience” and further points to the “irreversible aging process” of culture (131). Given that the central point of this branch of his argument is that the relationship between high and low cultural is perpetually in a dialectic relationship that is historically constitutive/contingent, it is easy enough to extend his analysis to our contemporary era (134). However, it is evident that the relationship between high and low of Jameson’s time has shifted. Where the attraction of consumer technology was once about using that technology, it seems now to be appealing simply to possess that technology. The desire for commodity and culture is thus a fruitless desire; a desire for the unattainable is a desire for an end (in some theory, the desire for death). If that isn’t post-modern, I don’t know what is.

To be more precise, while the marketing of consumer products has always projected the dual allure of trend and functionality, the ways in which these products are presented in digital age (which seems to me to be a post-technological age inasmuch as technology has become self-involved with its own drive for newness to a point where it no longer serves the consumer but controls them) suggests a combination of capitalistic and physical/sexual desire that belies Jameson’s focus. Culture is outdated the moment it is exposed to the light, so to speak. We now see the increased emphasis on consumerism: in a period where the economy is so worrisome, it has more prominent importance in culture production that it otherwise would have.

In this immediate economic moment, think about, for example, the term recessionista (I’m using fashion as a culture product, here: which I think it definitely is). Embodying at once a self-satisfied economic conscientiousness that parades itself as a “retro” desire for efficient/cost-effective products and an unconcealed desire for materiality (a play off of “fashionista,” another self-aware term) as a status symbol that bolsters the carefully erected socio-economic divide, “new language” like this hints at a culture that is quite at odds with its own ideas of high and low consumerism (a new kind of dialectic). This same idea of a consumer culture that conceptualizes (and markets!) itself as pragmatic while embodying unattainable materialism is present in media like film. A small but ubiquitous example is product placement in films. While the corporate funding/sponsorship of art brings an entirely new set of factors to the equation, for these purposes I am concerned primarily with the ways in which material factors are inextricable from culture, despite culture’s purported disavowal of that materialism. Think of how many movies and how many television shows prominently display the backlit apple logo on computers, the red label of a Coke can, or an unmistakable mark on the front of a car. This insertion of blatant materialism, while claiming to contribute to the realism (and thus aesthetic value) of a film merely brings the film more closely into this dialectical relationship between high culture and mass culture, at the root of which we find that, just as Adorno, et al. predicted, all culture is mass/materialist culture. If this seems just as bleak as Adorno, please don’t take it that way. The idea of a shifting dialectic allows for vastly more possibilities in the negotiation between consumerism and culture; a shift that will hopefully take a more positive turn when this economic situation stabilizes, perhaps allowing us to be open about our materialism and therefore more open to new culture.

[1] Am I not allowed to enjoy Rock of Love Bus if I really like Roy Porter? I’ll admit I was slightly offended by the [tragically true] fact that “hermetic culture is…stigmatized as a status bobby of small groups of intellectuals” (130).