He has 14 years teaching experience

Any attempt to link postmodernism and globalization demands an enquiry into the economic scenario of the present world. Although there are very limited number of studies in this direction the early attempt by Fredric Jameson to interpret postmodernism in terms of economic developments is a remarkable contribution towards this approach. Jameson neither follows the traditional Marxist approach to blandly reassert the primacy of economic determination as orthodox Marxism does, nor try to sunder the relations between culture and economy as the post-Marxists used to do. On the other hand his attempt was to develop a theory flexible enough to articulate the increasingly complex mediations between a global economic market and our discrete, fragmented, cultural experience. In many of the postmodern discussions, the literary events alone are being counted. Such discussions hover around a kind of pure aesthetics, which will not yield a real understanding of the phenomenon as such. Many of us often forget that post modernity is characterized by both an aggressive, entrepreneurial capitalism and an intense and prolonged wave of self-examination taking different but related forms. (The writers like K.P.Appan and N.Sasidharan, perhaps following Linda Hutcheon  disseminated the idea that postmodernism is a literary phenomenon where as writers like V.C.Sreejan opposed the idea of postmodernity claiming that it is a pure Western

phenomenon which has nothing to do with Kerala. Such errors crept into their analyses owing to either clinging to pure aesthetics or the traditional kind of economic determinism.) Economic background of the postmodernism is closely related to globalization in economy. An analysis of this relation is necessary to reveal the implications of postmodernity, which is attempted in this article.

The English translation of Francois Lyotard’s, Report on knowledge, as he calls it, was published in 1984. He focused on science and knowledge and showed the shift in the ways in which knowledge and science are both conceptualized and practiced. By means of analyzing the changes in the realm of knowledge he arrives at the conclusion that the incredibility towards meta-narratives is the mark of postmodernity and this incredulity results from scientific progress. Lyotard sees this shift as a necessary consequence of developments in science and technology. ‘Thus Lyotard eschews the story, so prevalent, for example, in the history and philosophy of economics, that knowledge has both simply progressed and that it has been the dynamic force behind social progress, as truth inevitably drives out error and knowledge comes to increasingly replace ideology.’3 Lyotard was an intellectual who embraced Marxism and even communist political movement from 1954 to 1964. But after 1970s he followed Freudian libidinal theory and with the publication of the report on knowledge he skipped all ideas of liberation. However it is noteworthy that Lyotard makes it clear that the obstacle before the ‘imaginative development of knowledge’ is the ‘socio-economic system and not the pragmatics of science itself’

As Perry Anderson remarks Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism served to “redraw the whole map of the postmodern at one stroke –a prodigious inaugural gesture that has commanded the field ever since”5. Unlike many other postmodernists Jameson tries to reveal that postmodernism does not mark the emergence of a new historical epoch but the intensification and restructuration of the social and productive relations of capitalism. For Jameson, the term postmodernism does not designate a particular aesthetic or discrete style but rather a periodizing concept, which serves to “correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order”6. Jameson depends upon the periodization presented by Ernest Mandel in his Late Capitalism. According to Mandel there has been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage. These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational capital.7 Jameson sees “a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas” in this new phase. He successfully unearths the new penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious. He points out the way in which the colonization was implemented. The destruction of precapitalist Third World agriculture by the Green Revolution, and the rise of the media and the advertising industry paved the way for a uniform culture throughout the world. So neither the postmodern economy nor the postmodern culture remains as a Western phenomenon. The expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas brought forth unprecedented change in the realm of culture. With modernism the sphere of culture was seen to have retained a degree of semi-autonomy: whether from the left or right, it retained an oppositional stance and critical distance towards capital. But postmodern culture has become fully integrated into commodity production in general, annulling its oppositional and critical stance.

Lenin had enumerated five principal features distinguishing imperialism from pre-monopolistic capitalism: (1) the concentration of production and capital, leading in the domination of the world economy by big monopolies (2) the fusion of bank and industrial capital and the consequent rise of financial oligarchy;(3) the specially important role of the export capital; (4) the division of the world among monopolistic leagues of international capitalists; (5) the completion of the territorial partition of the world among the great imperialist powers.9 The present day imperialism has the advantage of satellite channels, developments in bio-technology, the rise of information technology and the commodification of service sectors like health. Although Lenin had paved the way for understanding the present day imperialism he could not witness the postmodern changes in technology. Indeed he had seen the role of finance capital and the play of the speculators. He could notice the socialization of production and at the same time the exploitation immanent in the economic sphere.
“ Translated into ordinary human language this means that the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the “geniuses” of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialized production; but the immense progress of mankind, witch achieved this socialization, goes to benefit…. the speculators.”

When we come to analyze the postmodern condition we find the radical changes in technology creating new atmosphere in domination by means of destroying traditional industries and converting the sphere of culture and services into economic means of production. This tempted Douglas Kellner to identify the new stage as Techno-Capitalism and Jameson as late capitalism following Mandel. However Jameson sees the phase as high-capitalism or pure-capitalism or multinational capitalism. The highly developed transport and communication network and culture industry heightened the mobility of labour power and capital during the last decades of the twentieth century. The second half of the nineteenth century also saw a move towards globalization, with world trade increasing six-fold between 1850 and 1890. 11 But there were still inaccessible regions of traditional society. In addition to this the message emitted by the French revolution was ubiquitous and hence induced a lot of resistances from the native victims. The globalization of the present day covers the whole world without letting any nation or corner of the world being subjected to the process. As Jameson indicates, indeed there is communist Cuba to a great extent keeping away from the reformations in lieu with the changes in postmodernity. However almost all other parts of the world have been undergoing changes in accordance with the new economic order. By now the globe and its culture, rather than the nation-state, had become the primary concern. Robertson’s definition of globalization runs as follows:

“Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole… both concrete global interdependence and consciousness of the global whole.”12 In a globalized world there will be a single society and culture occupying the planet. So Malcolm Waters defines globalization as: A social process in which the constraints of geography on economic, political, social and cultural arrangements recede, in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding and in which people act accordingly.” 13 Globalization results from the imposition of Western culture throughout the world by means economic reforms. Actually this results from the export of capital and the structural adjustment programs imposed by the financial institutions like World Bank and IMF. It is wrong to draw conclusions such as culture has displaced economy. 14 On the other hand the expansion of the economic mode of production and the increased role of finance capital used to play a dominant part in determining the global politics. Structural adjustment conditionalities are imposed on third world countries by the financial institutions. “The world Bank and IMF structural adjustment programmes have been asserting ideological and governance authority for decades, and in 1994 the GATT determined that the WTO shall have the ultimate authority to define reasonable laws and sound sciences”15 International trade and investment policy, from the 1944 formation of the IMF and world Bank to 1994 Uruguay Round of GATT, which created the WTO, are organized to promote Corporations which serve the interest of the private capital. It employs the term structural adjustment to implement liberalization of investment policies, privatizing public industries and services, downsizing civil service employment, suppressing labour organizing, lifting costly regulation from business practices, devaluing currency, and cutting social spending and subsidies. The World Bank President McNamara said in 1979 that the bank should use program loans to induce ‘reforms’ in recipient, mainly middle –income countries. By this time the meaning of the term ‘reform’ was being changed to mean structural adjustment lending to promote export-orientation and trade liberalization. In 1980 the Bank laid out the general conditions under which structural adjustment loans (SALs) would be made available. It is seen that, “By the end of the 1980s a set of structural adjustment policies based in a rightist interpretation of neoclassicism was firmly in place”

All these changes have been undermining national sovereignty and implementing uniform way of market expansion. Here it is noteworthy that the period of modernity was a period of national uprisings and each nation produced not only its own leaders like Lenin, Mao and Gandhi but also its own developmental programs. Each nation evolved its own welfare schemes and strategies for security and safety. Indian constitution and its outlook to protect human rights itself deserve in depth attention. Despite the plight of the poor and oppressed in our country due to the sheer neglect of the governments and the elite nature of the bureaucracy, we had a vision of our own. The reservation policy to accommodate the weaker sections of the people especially the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes itself is a unique phenomenon although part III on Fundamental Rights of the constitution partly derives some inspiration from the Bill of Rights, enshrined in the American Constitution. The fact that Dr.Ambedkar had succumbed to the ideas of Western modernity did not prevent him from seeing local issues and framing solutions for the same. In other words, in India we had a bourgeois modernity but it exhibited its own unique features. On the one hand it imbibed the spirit of socialism from the newly formed socialist countries and on the other hand the spirit of bourgeois democracy from the American constitution. Each country evolved its own formula, visions and practices during the rise of national struggles not only in India but everywhere. Even in the very high level Brettenwood conference of 1944 many of the participants did not talk in English (Of course it was bad on the part of such countries signing such pacts without understanding the content of the agreement.) However the sign of nationality had been echoing in such conferences. Such peculiarities and identities are now being erased by means of structural adjustment conditionalities embracing education and service sector. As Jameson says, “Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and terror

Now the question is pertaining to the changes in the realm of artistic and literary production. How does change occur in the production and distribution of art and literature? Whether the changes in the production and distribution of art and literature exhibit the marks of globalization? Do they show any break from the modernity? Even Habermas who is one of the staunch critics of postmodernism admits the fact that aesthetic modernity no more exists in the present society. Habermas writes: “If I am not mistaken, the chances for this today are not very good. More or less in the entire Western world a climate had developed that furthers capitalist modernization processes as well as trends critical of cultural modernism.”18 The target of attack by Habermas was neo-conservatives like Daniel Bell whose purpose was to support and maintain capitalist economy. It is a matter to be feared upon that Habermas fails to see a good number of postmodernists like Jameson who disagrees with the neo-conservatives like Daniel Bell. At the same time the culture, which arise in the present world either in the form of retaliation or in the form of acceptance is to be identified as a new phenomenon. Whether the project of modernity is to be completed or to be discarded is yet another matter. What we are now compelled to admit is the fact that changes have been appearing in the sphere of culture ever since the process of globalization have started to appear in the present form. As the process of globalization advances the variation in the cultural arena becomes intense. “ In Marxism and Philosophy of language, Mikhail Bakhtin (Voloshinov) wrote: “ The sign cannot be separated from the social situation without relinquishing its nature as sign. Verbal communication can never be understood and explained outside of this connection with a concrete situation.”19 Now that the concrete situation of the whole world has been undergoing rapid changes the sign system also inevitably signifies the changes. In 1980 thinkers of postmodernity expressed their views in relation to the changing scenario. As Jameson says:“ Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject but rather that of some degraded collective “objective spirit”: it can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a present; rather as in Plato’s cave it must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls. If there is any realism left here, it is a “realism” that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.” 20 The changes during the past twenty years have created a certain condition where Jameson’s observation becomes more relevant. Now we have to look into the recent changes and the way in which cultural production takes place within the present context. The spread of visual media has created new way of interpellation. (As Althusser calls it). All over the world people watch visual medias which cannot work as Adorno desired. The deathlessness of the television programs as well as the intermissions for the advertisements create an atmosphere conducive for the commodified world. Adorno who had opposed Benjamin’s contention regarding the mode of changes in the works of art with the advent of technology was compelled to admit the fact that the aural element of the work of art is declining. Now it is not only the loss of aura of the works of art, which matters but also the ideological position of the writer and reader. So the “subject position”(to use Eagleton’s phrase) itself is different from the period of modernity. Nowadays the ideological apparatuses are not strictly state apparatuses as Althusser mentioned in his article on ideology. Although nation States exist as dominant ruling forces they are not free to propagate an ideology different from the interests of the multinational corporations. Contemporary technological leap provides ample occasion for the MNCs and the huge financial institutions to ‘interpellate’ the people in such a way as required by them. Let us see the present form of cultural invasion.

“By 1990, the technology was in place to map all the world’s land and sea resources from space. And the new merger of computer, laser, and satellite technologies combined the possibility to produce instantaneous world wide corporate communication, capital transfer and resource control. Meanwhile the globalization of television transmission via satellite and the ubiquitousness of advertising enabled Western industrial corporations to spread commodity culture and Western material values everywhere, even to non-developed countries that had no roads. This led in turn to rapid homogenization of cultures within a Western economic paradigm. …The notion of local economy and local control became anomalous and increasingly impossible.”

The developments in world economy and culture towards homogenization have started producing dissent among the victims. Neocolonial applications of culture produce certain inspiration for inventing a different context within the memory of one’s own. Each people endeavours to bring forth the memory of their own history and put forward their own paradigms. People have started to get them organized against WTO and other Bretten Wood institutions. Simultaneously we find new literatures and styles of life. As Terry Eagleton writes: “There is also the culture of opposition, which has produced some distinguished work in the twentieth century. Oppositional culture is not necessarily a category in itself; on the contrary, it can be produced by high, postmodern and identity culture, or by various permutations of all three.”

The philosophies evolved after structuralism have been playing dominant role in the promulgation of new dissent cultures in different parts of the world. The theoretical implications of the post-structural philosophers could create a new space to encounter the complex situation. Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Rorty have shown certain ways of their own which, somehow produced new political vision for the creative writers. What they could emphatically establish was that ‘no narrative can be a natural “master” narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we construct’23 These philosophers could introduce a shift from the search for transcendent timeless meaning and an eternal Truth. They offer a method or rather methods to look into the accepted norms especially the traps or ‘blind spots’ inherent in the discourses of modernity. So we have started a re-evaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the present. Although Marx had written a lot on ecology we could not see them until the recent developments. Now we are inventing Marx’s Ecology.24 Similar is the case with feminism. Lenin had expressed his ambition to convene a women’s international. But we could not open up the issues pertaining to the male dominant ideology of the modern texts until the postmodern turn. Indeed there are so many paradoxes and contradictions immanent in postmodernism. These paradoxes and contradictions constitute the new reality. But these paradoxes and contradictions cannot be taken as a permission to underestimate the role of the postmodern philosophers to revitalize not only the political movements but also the aesthetic. As Rupert Murdoch claimed satellite technology could pose a threat to national sovereignties. At the same time as the experiences in the recent day’s shows a good number of resistance movements are gaining momentum. The experience of the Seattle itself is encouraging. In various parts of the world people have started to re-think their own passivity. Anyhow the process of appropriation as well as the resistances moves in a different way; both neocolonial oppression and the struggles against it invite new forms of intervention, which perhaps is still in the embryonic stage.

1. Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson, Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism, Cambridge,1998,p.4

2. Hans Bretens and Joseph Natoli (eds) , Postmodernism: The Key Figures , Oxford, Blackwell, 2002, p.xv

3. Stephen Cullen berg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio (eds) Postmodernism, Economics and knowledge,Routledge, London and Newyork.2001, p.9.

4. Jean- Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984, p.64.

5. Quoted from The Origins of Postmodernity, in Hans Bretens and Joseph Natoli (eds) , Postmodernism: The Key Figures , Oxford, Blackwell, 2002, p181.

6. Postmodernism: The Key figures,p183.

7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, 1991, p.35.

8. Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson, Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism, Cambridge,1998,p.107.

9. Leszek Kolakovsky Main Currents of Marxism, 2.The Golden Age, Trans. P.S.Palla, Oxford University Press, Oxford and Newyork 1978, p.491-492.

10. Lenin, Selected Works in three volumes, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977,p.650

11. Ronaldo Munck, Globalization and Labour, Madhyam Books, Delhi, 2002, p.135.

12. Malcolm Waters,Globalization, 2nd Edition , Routledge, London and NewYork, 1995,p.4.

13. Malcolm Waters,Globalization, 2nd Edition , Routledge, London and NewYork, 1995,p .5

14. Samuel P Huntigton in his The clash of Civilizations and the remaking of World Order, Penguin Books (1996)1997 claims that global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines.

15. Amory Starr, Naming the Enemy, Anti-Corporate Movements ,Confront Globalization, Zed Books, London and NewYork, (2000)2001,p.9.

16. Richard Peet, Unholy Trinity, The IMF, World Bank and WTO, Zed Books, London and NewYork,p.125

17. Frdric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p.5.

18. Jurgen Habermas, ‘Modernity-an incomplete Project’ in Modernism/Postmodernism, Ed. Peter Brooker, Longman, London and New York,p136.

19. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, History, Theory , Fiction, Routledge, London and NewYork, 1988, p.80.

20. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 25.

21. Quoted in Joost Smiers, Arts Under Pressure , promoting cultural diversity in the age of globalization, Zed Books , Londo and New York, 2003,p.53

22. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2000,p.86.

23. Linda Hutcheon, A poetics of Postmodernism, History, Theory, Fiction,p.13.

24. See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology , Cornerstone Publications, NewYork, 2000