Capital’s own logic of reification drives realism through modernism into postmodernism.

Evidence

Once upon a time at the dawn of capitalism and middle-class society, there emerged something called the sign, which seemed to entertain unproblematical relations with its referent. This initial heyday of the sign — the moment of literal or referential language or of the unproblematic claims of so-called scientific discourse — came into being because of the corrosive dissolution of older forms of magical language by a force which I will call that of reification, a force whose logic is one of ruthless separation and disjunction, of specialization and rationalization, of a Taylorizing division of labor in all realms. Unfortunately, that force — which brought traditional reference into being — continued unremittingly, being the very logic of capital itself. Thus this first moment of decoding or of realism cannot long endure; by a dialectical reversal it then itself in turn becomes the object of the corrosive force of reification, which enters the realm of language to disjoin the sign from the referent. Such a disjunction does not completely abolish the referent, or the objective world, or reality, which still continue to entertain a feeble existence on the horizon like a shrunken star or red dwarf. But its great distance from the sign now allows the latter to enter a moment of autonomy, of a relatively free-floating Utopian existence, as over against its former objects. This autonomy of culture, this semiautonomy of language, is the moment of modernism, and of a realm of the aesthetic which redoubles the world without being altogether of it, thereby winning a certain negative or critical power, but also a certain otherworldly futility. Yet the force of reification, which was responsible for this new moment, does not stop there either: in another stage, heightened, a kind of reversal of quantity into quality, reification penetrates the sign itself and disjoins the signifier from the signified. Now reference and reality disappear altogether, and even meaning — the signified — is problematized. We are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call Postmodernism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts — such is the logic of Postmodernism in general, which finds one of its strongest and most original, authentic forms in the new art of experimental video. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 256

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the three-stage dialectic of reification as the historical engine: sign-referent (realism) → sign autonomy (modernism) → signifier/signified split (postmodernism).
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the core mechanism of the whole book — the periodizing story in which aesthetic style is the economy’s way of appearing, exactly what the reader wants to test for falsifiability.
• XREF: connects to: Capital both created and then liquidated the reality principle — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 83; A modernism absorbed into mass media serves the existing socio-economic structure. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 787; Rise of finance capital is inseparable from the postmodern turn in culture — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 93 (+1 more)