Aesthetics And Politics In Postmodern Theory

How are Politics and Aesthetics linked in Postmodern Theory?: Exploring Frederic Jameson and Zygmunt Bauman s Aesthetico-Political Positions.

The turn towards the primacy of aesthetic considerations in studies of modernity and postmodernity (and its various labels, from post-industrial capitalism to late capitalism, and liquid modernity, among others) has garnered the attention of many theorists in the social sciences. This essay seeks to analyse some of the arguments presented on the link between aesthetics and politics by Zygmunt Bauman and Fredric Jameson, theorists chosen for their sensitivity to the progression aesthetics and the mass media, but also the recent developments of capitalism and the impact that this has had on the social, political and ethical life of those living under these conditions. The essay begins by addressing the arguments presented by Jameson in his 1991 work Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, a work that emphasises the processes of commodification and reification in contemporary consumer culture and the impact that developments of capitalism (such as globalisation) have had on the ethical duty towards Third World producers. The essay then moves on to look at the way in which Bauman extends Jameson s analysis of the ethical distance from responsibility to the Other by enlarging the scope of his analysis of globalisation, consumerism and capital development to not only those left behind by consumerism, but also those with the capacity to live according to its logic. The essay concludes in agreement with the two theorists on the negative impact of the aestheticisation of life, and the way in which this is promulgated through consumer culture, to the ultimate end of an erosion of ethical and political duty and the political capacity of nation states and individual agents.

In Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson seeks to expand on the Culture Industry thesis of Adorno and Horkheimer by focusing on the impact that developments in the capitalist system and the proliferation of new media technologies and techniques, have on the subject inhabiting such a world. What makes Jameson s approach to the aesthetics of the postmodern politically salient is his attention to capitalist developments at a global level, and the integration of aesthetic production into commodity production generally (Jameson, 1991: p.3). The postmodern age has at its core, for Jameson, the fundamental ideological task of coordinating new forms of practice and social and mental habits...with the new forms of economic production and organization thrown up by the modification of capitalism (1991: p.xiv), and thus this interrelation between modern cultural production and politics has wide reaching implications for the very nature of, and capacity for, social organisation, distinct from ideas of classical capitalism such as class struggle and industrial production (1991: p.3).

Central to Jameson s thesis is the idea of the waning of affect (1991: p.10) within postmodern art and aesthetic representation, perhaps best understood in his work as a lack of depth, a clamouring for absent historical context and a distinctive fragmentation of the subject alongside an inability to locate oneself spatio-temporally within the world. To emphasise this, Jameson compares Van Gogh s painting of the peasant shoes - which for him signifies all that is meant by a modernist approach to art and aesthetics, drenched as the painting is in the historical context of being a peasant worker, invoking the loneliness and hardship of agricultural labour - with Warhol s piece Diamond Dust Shoes , which conversely evokes none of this imagery or empathy in the mind of the audience (1991: pp.6-9) and confronts the viewer as inexplicably natural (1991: p.8). This inexplicable naturality underpins the Marxist backbone of Jameson s critique the reproduction of festishized commodities and objects (1991: p.7) and reified social relations in the postmodern age. Such objects, formerly understood to have been created by humans and imbued with their humanity (such as the peasants shoes), under conditions of reified social relations and fetishized commodities, become alien objects that confront the viewer as having come into being naturally. Munch s The Scream is used to further illustrate the difference between modernist aesthetics and those of the postmodern. The Scream , with its themes of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation (1991: p.11), embodies the anxiety of existence, a feeling entirely absent in Warhol s imagery of mass reproduced commodities (1991: p.9) and the wider system of cultural production in late capitalism. Jameson s argument regarding the postmodern aesthetic rests upon the idea that the fundamental nature of culture has been transformed in late capitalism (1991: pp.47-48), to the point that all experience of social life, from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself (1991: p.48) has become cultural, eroding the autonomy of the cultural sphere. This reified aesthetic experience, the reproduction en masse of cultural products, is seen by Jameson to have its origins in the fundamental developments of capitalism during the period he describes as late capitalism.

New technological developments and the transnational evolution of late modern capitalism have proliferated the volume of cultural products, from mass media and b-movies to Reader s Digest culture, airport literature, the science fiction and fantasy novels (Jameson, 1991: p.3), such that for Jameson every position in postmodernism in culture...is also... an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today (1991: p.3). Through new technology in late capitalism and the needs of global capital, aesthetic production has become integrated into commodity production more generally and led to the need to produce constantly new-seeming waves of cultural goods that can be sold (1993: pp.4-5) it is this economic necessity that has fundamentally altered the aesthetic dimension of culture, organized now around economic necessities rather than representations of human emotion or the sublime. As capitalism has progressed, traditional enclaves of non-commodified space have been infiltrated by capitalist commodification, such as the Third World (through transnational corporations and their products), the unconscious (through advertising), and postmodern art which absorbs the themes of mass culture and consumer society (Shusterman, 1989: p.608) to such an extent that the distinctiveness of the artistic/aesthetic realm no longer exists, subsumed as it is into every aspect of the social.

As a result of the above developments, the aesthetic of postmodernism confers a flatlessness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality (Jameson, 1991: p.9), longing for a history but it can only achieve pastiche, nostalgia and the reproduction of dead styles as small compensation for the lack of its own history (1991: p.17-19). This transforms the world into sheer images of itself , a world of simulacrum (1991: p.18) leaving only pastiche historical simulacra, and reified cultural objects with which to cling to and locate itself (Jameson, 1991: p.21, 25). The world of history becomes that of its pop-history representations, in film, art and literature present historical context is understood in terms of these pastiche historical simulacra, transforming the present into a glossy mirage or skin (Jameson, 1991: p.21, 34) of image production. The result is confrontation with the dimly perceivable reality of late capitalism (1991: p.38) that results in bewilderment between the body and the built environment (1991: p.44). It is this that Jameson calls postmodern hyperspace a state that transcends the capacity of the human body to locate itself and organize its immediate surroundings (1991: p44). The link between aesthetics and politics in Jameson s work becomes obvious capitalism and the bleeding of the cultural into the social fragments the subject and gives rise to the idea of the postmodern sublime the derealisation of the world surrounding everyday reality. The subject becomes confronted with the terrifying enormity of late capitalism, crippling the ability to cognitively map and locate oneself (1991: p.34). Art no longer exists as that which contrasts and opposes the real, because reality has become unreal and is seen as textuality with no external referent, as but a tissue of simulacra with no original, mechanically produced and standardized by late-capitalist industrialization and the mass media (Shusterman, 1989: p.608.) The critical capacity of art has been disarmed by the system and absorbed into it (Jameson, 1991: p.49), and this new aestheticism has a substantial social effect on the nature of group identity and the way in which the population is constituted, which will now be explored.

The modification of culture towards capitalist ends, its commodification of the social and of culture has significant impacts by way of turning subjects into distinct groups organised along lines of consumption, and the ethical distraction that processes of reification entails. Through the media, hidden or ignored subjects are brought to light (Jameson, 1991: pp.357-358), entailing a plurality of group identities such that everyone represents several groups at once (Jameson, 1991: p.322) - postmodernist aesthetics and the developments of late capitalism and media technology seemingly give rise to a growth in pluralistic social groupings. The generation of new groups, through choices regarding taste (Jameson: p.298, 325), as potential consumers for new products, modifies group identity more in terms of a choice of fashion (Jameson, 1991: p.325). As groups become constituted in the image form, this allows for the collective effacement and amnesia of their history and a reconstruction of their own fantastic genealogies (1991: p.361) that enables them to be subsumed into the media (1991: pp.346-347) and subjected to the reproduction of socio-cultural images that restructures social relations in.

The reification of commodities, the effacement of the traces of production from the object itself (Jameson, 1991: p.314) and the cultural-aesthetic dimension of late capitalism engenders an ethical quandary that has significant political repercussions in a globalised world. If an object presents itself, discussed above, as natural and free from a human element of production, consumers lose sight of the work that goes into their products. In a globalised world, this human element is manifest most prominently in the consequences for Third World producers and the conditions in which they work. The consumer is able to forget about such conditions, creating an ethical distance between themselves and the producers, reducing notions of guilt and responsibility to fellow human beings (Jameson, 1991: pp.314-315.) The immediacy of suffering is sufficiently distanced from the act of consumption through reification it shuts the consumer away from sympathetic participation, by imagination in the production of commodities (Jameson, 1991: p.317) voices that would remind the consumer of the debt of these countries, the adverse effects of globalisation in terms of unemployment, structural homelessness and urban blight become sounded out by the aestheticised reality of global capitalism and its cheerleaders (Jameson, 1991: p.375). Referring to the channel switching nature of postmodern culture, Jameson implies that subjects can tune in and out of circumstances at will, negotiating circumstances without reference to history existing in a flux of constant renegotiation (1991: p.373.)

Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism offers a descri ption of the postmodern condition of fragmentation and an inability to comprehend and map the multinational, global nature of capitalism and transnational networks. What Jameson s work suggests, however, is a condition of a cognitive-latency that the conditions to which individuals are subjected and the impact of this on the psyche, is a result of the sheer speed of late-capitalist developments. There exists an undertone within the work that, through realising the conditions that confront them and actively seeking to change them, to glimpse the main chance... and reorganise the world around them (Jameson, 1991: p.408), there is an emancipatory potential within the postmodernist project. This cognitive mapping (1991: p.409) involves a realization and tracking down of the ultimate realities and experiences designated by culture (1991: pp.411-412) so that the disparate and discontinuous realities that confront the subject can be dealt with through a practical politics at the social levels of the labour process, the media and culture, the juridical apparatus, and electoral politics (Jameson, 1991: p.413) reconceptualising and renegotiating political and socio-cultural space, from a local level, towards an emancipatory trajectory. Movements focusing their discourse on the impacts of globalisation can be seen in the years since the publishing of Jameson s work, from the 1999 Seattle protests to the Occupy movement, that have put forward a challenge to the dominance of consumerism, corporate greed, and ethical vacuity of the postmodern age, movements that could be seen to play a role in informing future struggles over the cognitive mapping of socio-political and cultural space. This essay will now move on to explore the parallels between Jameson s analysis of the cultural logic of late-capitalism and the work of Zygmunt Bauman on postmodernism and liquid modernity , in particular the impact of globalisation and consumerism on the ethical and political responsibilities of the individual.

For Bauman, the postmodern perspective is that of the alter ego to modernism, allowing a permanent and unfinishable task of critique and critical engagement to be undertaken regarding the previously solid assertions on reality that characterised the modernist era (Bauman & Tester, 2001: p.75.) Bauman conceives of liquid modernity as a state in which social forms (structures that guard repetitions of routines, patterns of acceptable behaviour) can no longer (and are not expected) to keep their shape for long, because they decompose and melt faster than the time it takes to cast them... (Bauman, 2007: p.1), leading to a fragmentation of long-term thinking, planning and acting on the side of individuals their lives become lived in a series of short-term projects and episodes (Bauman, 2007: pp.3-4). Characteristic of liquid modernity is the abandonment of any search for a blueprint of a better social order (Franklin, 2003: p.206), an erosion of human bonds built on shared interest, and the sacrifice of individual interests for longer term benefits that for Bauman results from the increasing exposure of the individual to market forces that privileges division and competition to the detriment of collaboration and collective benefit (Bauman, 2007: pp.2-3). The short-termism of postmodern life, the constant disembedding of subjects from unreliable frames, constructs the postmodern era as one of an episodic character without a consistent logical order (Bauman & Tester, 2001: pp.88-90,) an approach that can be seen as consistent with Jameson s assertions on the fragmentary nature of the subject and inability to map oneself in spatio-temporal terms. The economic, political and social trajectory of the capitalist system, like Jameson, is at the core of Bauman s analysis of liquid modernity issues of consumerism and consumer culture, and their associated aesthetic dimensions form the basis for his critique of the socio-political organisation of postmodern society, in particular the retreat from ethical responsibility.

Consumer culture stands for production, distribution, desiring, obtaining and using, of symbolic goods and exists in the real of the city as well as the irreal of cyberspace, advertising, shop signs and the internet (Blackshaw, 2005: p.113.) The aesthetic dimension of consumer culture, the exchange relating to the consumer code and the struggle over the meaning of commodities, engages individuals who live vicariously through the products that they consume, unable and unwilling to leave the marketplace, in a constant effort to make life palpable and liveable (Blackshaw, 2005: pp.113-116.) It is the society of taste, of aesthetics, of theatricality and performance, a perceived freedom of choice and a confrontation with endless choice (Blackshaw, 2005: p.119, 125) in which freedom to consume at will replaces social stratifications based on race, class, gender, eroding responsibilities to fellow citizens, and exerting control over them (Blackshaw, 2005: pp.119-120). Market failings that embed divisions and humiliations are recast in consumer society as facts of nature that are incontrovertible (Bauman & Tester, 2001: p.66) the solutions to unhappiness and troubles is to be found in a shop, to be bought for a price (Bauman & Tester, 2001: pp.113-114.) Citizens no longer learn to discuss and negotiate problems, as solutions to ills can be found more cheaply through shopping, and problems are ameliorated and temporarily allayed through consumption (Bauman & Tester, 2001: pp.113-114.)

The notion of performance within the consumer society previously mentioned ties into Bauman s descri ption of the managed playground, (Bauman, 1993: pp.176-177), an aesthetic space of marvel in which actors experience guaranteed enjoyment that feels like free play and creative imagining. In reality, it is a system of aesthetic control, where strangers are manifest merely as a source of entertainment for the onlooker (Bauman, 1993: p.168, 176-177), as figures within their own internal theatre performance that separates the director (the individual) and the stranger in terms of social distance (Bauman, 1993: p.170.) The stranger is close enough, in aesthetic proximity, to be visible, but distant enough to be detached from having their own identity and biography (Bauman, 1993: pp.172-173). The ultimate manifestation of this guaranteed enjoyment, the managed playground, is the telecity, which takes the presence of the stranger as entertainment within the managed playground and transports him into the living room of the viewer through mediums such as television, video games and film that give ultimate control over the stranger to the viewer who is able to control the stranger via a joystick, or terminate his voyeuristic engagement with the stranger when the amusement factor dries up (Bauman, 1993: pp.177-178).

The importance of this aesthetic distance is one of ethics and politics for Bauman, who approaches ethics from a Levinasian position of ... responsibility for the well-being and dignity of the Other (Bauman & Tester, 2001: p.57) that is conferred through direct confrontation with human suffering. This ethical perspective concerns justice and the notion of the Other in an ethical society justice would be conceived in terms of a society that reacts angrily to injustice and seeks to correct it when the Other appears and presents their suffering (Bauman & Tester, 2001: p.63). When such aesthetic distance as that achieved through the telecity and managed playground replaces the criteria of the social with those of the aesthetic (Bauman, 1993: p.179), the feeling of moral responsibility to the Other as a demanding face is diminished and subordinated to the search for aesthetic satisfaction (Bauman, 1993: pp.180-182), which for Bauman represents a problem of individualisation within consumer society. Such aesthetic spaces engender isolation and individualism, where any sense of social ties are incidental and superficial (Bauman, 1993: p.178), eroding bonds of solidarity and kinship, as well as ethical responsibility. Of particular importance to this aesthetic society is the way in which these processes are reinforced and supported by the market and capitalism which gives primacy to consumer choice and elevates it to the position of the sole arbiter of human happiness (Bauman, 1993: p.182.) The aesthetic role of the stranger in the telecity, as a source of no-strings-attached entertainment (Bauman, 1993: p.178), is extrapolated onto wider ethical and political considerations of the polis. It is at this point that the political and economic significance of processes of globalisation become important to Bauman, as shall now be explored.

Bauman s sensitivity to the role of globalization and the development of capitalism rivals that of Jameson, but with the added analytical depth of looking at the way in which globalization not only impacts on the producers of commodities in the developing world and the weakening of moral responsibility towards them on the part of the developed, and the asymmetric nature of mobility that globalization generates. It is this asymmetry that he identifies as conferring both localizing and globalizing forces globalizing in terms of mobility for those with the resources at their disposition to be so, but a fixed and enforced localization with limited autonomy for those without (Bauman, 1998: pp.2-3.) This dichotomy is referred to by Bauman as the difference between Tourists and Vagabonds (Bauman, 1998: p.94). For Bauman, the tourists set the tone and compose the rules of the life-game whilst being local in a globalized world is a sign of social deprivation and degradation (Bauman, 1998: p.3). The consumerist nature of global capital on the part of the mobile necessitates the cultivation of desires for aestheticized commodities and the promise that mobility, the hope of travelling (digitally or geographically) will bring with it the promise of bliss through the consumption of new attractions and the enjoyment of new experiences (Bauman, 1998: p.83) the global world for tourists is one in which the constraining nature of space is lost (Bauman, 1998: p.88). Tourists behave in a grazing fashion, moving between fields and consuming until they become bored or the amusement of a particular area is exhausted, with limited ethical considerations towards those without the ability to do as they do (Franklin, 2003: p.208) they behave as cloakroom communities who come together for a brief period, enjoy the spectacle, take their coats and leave without an afterthought (Franklin, 2003: p.214).

There exists an asymmetric distribution of opportunities for those low down , the vagabonds, who risk being thrown into flux and evicted from the sites that they would like to stay or whom must sell their culture to the tourists (Franklin, 2003: p.213.) they are mobile but not on their own terms (Bauman, 1998: pp.86-87). Those displaced from sites, constitutive of the increasing redundant demographic of globalization lacking a place on earth (Bauman, 2007: p.45) The vagabonds are blocked from access to the desires cultivated through exposure to mass media and celebrity culture, the exoneration of the rich by the very virtue of their being wealthy, and their exploits of aesthetically-guided consumption and the denigration of the material possessions that normal people possess (Bauman, 1998: p.95). Vagabonds, as flawed consumers, are precariously positioned through their inability to participate in the activities and life choices of the tourists and thus become targets for scapegoating and stigmatizing (Bauman, 1998: p.96), and yet they are indispensible to the tourists, whom without the vagabonds would have nobody to flaunt their alternative and excessive life to (Bauman, 1998: p.98.) It is the wish of the vagabonds, not to transcend the tourists, but simply to become a tourist themselves, wishing to participate in the aesthetically driven consumption (Bauman, 1998: p.94). For Bauman, the tourist and the vagabond are both consumers who interact with the world through aesthetics, seeing the world as food for sensibility - a matrix of possibly experiences (Bauman, 1998: p.94).

This aesthetic consumer life impacts on the ethical duties felt towards the Other where the moral identity of the polis is lost in the pursuit of aesthetic satisfaction (Bauman, 1993: p.182), whilst the stigmatization of vagabonds and flawed consumers forms foundation of electoral platforms of politicians keen to protect the floundering power and sovereignty of the state, simultaneously building up the walls and ghettos to keep insiders in, and outsiders out, keeping vagabonds from where they would like to be (Bauman & Tester, 2001: pp.92-93.) In a globalized world, in which actions reverberate across space, there is all the more call for ethical and collective political duty to the Other, yet it is the very aestheticization of society identified by Bauman that hamstrings the development of a sense of moral responsibility the Other to be embraced is increasingly temporo-spatially distant and abstract, unlikely to be confronted (Bauman & Tester, 2001: p.145), but suffering more intensely because of the actions of those that make up the tourist demographic. The growing duty towards others in a globalised world has not led to an increase in the financial assistance given to agencies designed to alleviate some of the inequality, nor has the principle of responsibility to others been reflected in the governments that are elected, subordinated as this ethical responsibility towards the Other has been to the pursuit of wealth and economic growth (Bauman & Tester, 2001: p.67). Even in the age of mass media technologies, in which carnivals of pity bring home the horrifying likeness of human suffering (Bauman & Tester, 2001: p.146), the moral imperative of the Other is a surface image, with little investigation of the causes of suffering. The processes of globalization and individualization that emerge from the development of consumer society and capitalism more widely, impacts upon the agency of individuals by redefining the political citizen as the consumer of goods supplied by the ministerial companies (Bauman & Tester, 2001: p.151) the process of globalization strips interest and involvement in politics of much of its practical sense and so of attraction, whilst that of individualization makes it unlikely that the interest in politics would be expressed in any way that counts (Bauman & Tester, 2001: p.151.)

Unlike the work of Jameson, within Bauman s work there seems little that can be done to circumvent the ethical and political vacuity of liquid modernity. Bauman s work is somewhat more pessimistic as to the effects of aestheticisation and consumerism: the moral condition he identifies is here to stay (1993: p.185). It is this inescapable nature of liquid modernity that is precisely the political quandary that emerges from the aesthetic and consumerist imperative even those, like the vagabonds, who do not have the capacity to live as the tourists do, want nothing more than to be able to, and not to redress the system in a more generally equitable direction. The ability to escape, through something like Jameson s cognitive mapping, is absent in Bauman, and the reader is left with the impression that, in spite of the work of numerous NGOs and charities worldwide, the consumerist machine ploughs forward, destroying the livelihoods of the vagabonds and displacing them to create new grazing fields for the small number of tourists.

This essay has analysed two key and related approaches to the political impact of postmodern aesthetics, emphasizing the centrality of capital development for both Bauman and Jameson. It has shown the ethical implications of globalisation and the distance engendered from the ethical responsibility to the Other present in each perspective. It has further discussed the emergence of new groups under consumer capitalism, be they the vagabonds and tourists of Bauman or the plurality of new groups that Jameson identifies as a result of mass media and the plethora of choice under capitalism, lacking their own history and unable to locate themselves spatio-temporally. Through the work of Bauman, the problems of globalisation identified in Jameson s work are expanded to encompass not only the experiences of third world producers, but also those forcefully uprooted and cast into the world without a place of their own. Finally, the essay has juxtaposed the potential for overcoming the postmodern condition, through cognitive mapping, in Jameson, with the pessimism of Bauman s assertions that such ethical distance from responsibility to the other as generated by liquid modernity is insurmountable, leaving little chance for redemption or the emergence of a revived ethical imperative, concluding that, for an emancipatory politics, whilst Bauman s analysis is more extensive as to the ethical responsibilities lost, the cognitive mapping approach of Jameson is more salient for a postmodern emancipatory politics than the pessimism of Bauman.

Bibliography

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Shusterman, R. (1989). "Postmodernism and the Aesthetic Turn." Poetics Today 10(3): 605-622.