The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

100 The passage from modernity to postmodernityfast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas andopinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsoletebefore they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that isholy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sobersense the real conditions of their lives and their relations . withtheir fellow men. (Marx and Engels, 1952, 25)The sentiments certainly match those of Baudelaire and, as Bermanpoints out, Marx here unlooses a rhetoric that defines the undersideof al modernist a s hetics. ut what i e i l about Marx is the wayhe dIssects the ongm of thIS general-conditIOn.Marx begins Capital, for example, with an analysis of commodities,those everyday things (food, shelter, clothing, etc.) which we dailyonsume in the course of reproducing ourselves. Yet the commodityIS, he avers, 'a mysterious thing' because it simultaneously embodiesboth a use value (it fulfils a particular want or need) and an exchangevalue (I can use it as a bargaining chip to procure other commodities).This duality always renders the commodity ambiguous for us; shallwe consume it or trade it away? But as exchange relations proliferateand price-fixing markets form, so one commodity typically crystallizesout as money. With money the mystery of the commodity takes on anew twist, because the use value of money is that it represents theworld of social labour and of exchange value. Money lubricatesexchange but above all it becomes the means by which we typicallycompare and assess, both before and after the fact of exchange, thevalue of all commodities. Plainly, since the way we put value onthings is important, an analysis of the money form and the consequencesthat flow from its use are of paramount interest.The advent of a money economy, Marx argues, dissolves thebonds and relations that make up 'traditional' communities so that'money becomes the real community.' We move from a social condition,in which we depend directly on those we know personally, toone in which we depend on impersonal and objective relations withothers. As exchange relations proliferate, so money appears moreand more as 'a power external to and independent of the producers,'so what 'originally appears as a means to promote production becomesa relation alien' to them. Money concerns dominate producers.Money and market exchange draws a veil over, 'masks' social relationshipsbetween things. This condition Marx calls 'the fetishismof commodities.' It is one of Marx's most compelling insights, for itposes the problem of how to interpret the real but neverthelesssuperficial relationships that we can readily observe in the marketplace in appropriate social terms.M oderniz ation 101The conditions of labour and life, the sense of joy, anger, orfrustration that lie behind the production of commodities, the statesof mind of the producers, are all hidden to us as we exchange oneobject (mon .ey) for another (the commodity). We can take our dailybreakfast WIthout a thought for the myriad people who engaged inits production. All traces of exploitation are obliterated in the object(there are no finger marks of exploitation in the daily bread). Wecannot tell from contemplation of any object in the supermarketwhat conditions of labour lay behind its production. The concept offetishism explains how it is that under conditions of capitalist modernizationwe can be so objectively dependent on 'others' whose livesand aspirations remain so totally opaque to us. Marx's meta-theoryseeks to tear away that fetishistic mask, and to understand the socialrelations that lie behind it. He would surely accuse those postmodernistswho proclaim the 'impenetrability of the other' as theircreed, of overt complicity with the fact of fetishism and of indifferencetowards underlying social meanings. The interest of CindySherman's photographs (or any postmodern novel for that matter)is that they focus on masks without commenting directly on socialmeanings other than on the activity of masking itself.But we can take the analysis of money deeper still. If money is toperform its functions effectively, Marx argues, it must be replaced bymere symbols of itself (coins, tokens, paper currency, credit), whichlead it to be considered as a mere symbol, an 'arbitrary fiction'sanctioned by 'the universal consent of mankind.' Yet it is throughthese 'arbitrary fictions' that the whole world of social labour, ofproduction and hard daily work, get represented. In the absence ofsocial labour, all money would be worthless. But it is only throughmoney that social labour can be represented at all.The magical powers of money are compounded by the way owners'lend their tongues' to commodities by hanging a price ticket onthem, appealing to 'cabalistic signs' with names like pounds, dollars,francs. So even though money is the signifier of the value of sociallabour, the perpetual danger looms that the signifier will itself becomethe object of human greed and of human desire (the hoarder, theavaricious miser, etc.). This probability turns to certainty once werecognize that money, on the one hand a 'radical leveller' of all otherforms of social distinction, is itself a form of social power that can beappropriated as 'the social power of private persons.' Modern society,Marx concludes, 'soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of hishead.Jrom the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, asthe glittering incarnation of the very pinciple of its own life.' Doespostmodernism signal a reinterpretation or reinforcement of the role