Deterritorialization of Culture

This newer term corresponds to a newer cultural space [chiefly under western and also in developing countries’ industrialization strategies] that has been created because of deterritorialization of traditional cultural spaces. It even appears to be mandatory along with the natural institutional growth toward modernization. According to Garcia Canclini, this notion refers to ‘the loss of the natural relation between culture with geographic and social territory [including] relocalizations of new and old forms of symbolic production’. Basically with the industrial [technological] modernization, random inflow of popular cultural elements and forms are deterritorializing traditional cultural spaces and releasing cultural signs from any fixed time and space. Noted analyst James Lull has stated that ‘deterritorialization is the [partial] disintegration of human and symbolic constellations and patterns... it is a consequence of the cultural disjuncture... it is one indication of the cultural change that the disjunctures stimulate’.

But theorists interestingly while further deriving the term ‘deterritorialization’ have time and again exemplified the migration of third world people into ‘more developed’ specially western territories. Naturally this migration causes severe uprooting of the traditional cultural base and major disruption of its valuation that compulsively drives individuals to adapt desirably [or undesirably] new cultural base elements for leading a better cultural life. Prof. Lull exemplified this kind of deterritorialization that the African and Asian slave trade in colonial North America, Brazil, and the Carribbean countries ago...and illegal immigrant Mexican farm workers in United States’. In India also such migrations [though within the national territory but in such a vast location, migration often results in the transportation of individual belongings more than 2000 kilometers from one part to another corner of the country] had been a major occurrence always, both in its colonial and post colonial times, from less developed areas to the bit more affluent places. But theorists like Canclini, Lull in this context do not usually accept any definition of newer cultural codification as they desire to identify this phenomenon as quite natural and inevitable as well. They leave it as purely a ‘human matter’.

But the deterritorialization of culture howsoever occurs in human mind, under any circumstance, through only physical migration from any kind of ‘less to affluent’, this theoretical proposition has been reduced to an idealized end that ‘culture never dies, even in conditions of orchestrated repression’. But this is also an open ended conclusion that people from most of the developing countries, while migrating to a better place for enhanced living, invariably opt out the root cultural praxis to make room for adopting better cultural elements and newer praxis. Only thing may be left alive that people would perform some codes of their root cultural practices superficially that would never percolate to the next generations, e.g., organizing Durga Puja festival by the non resident Bengalee people. This global festival is performed quite differently across regions and settlements outside Bengal keeping the rituals almost unchanged. Here this festival can’t make a course of life along with other popular codifications of that region. Baudrillard once very interestingly quoted that ‘we don’t want nature, we want parks; we similarly don’t want exact course of religion but the Durga Puja as festival only. So it is quite naturally discursive and so deterritorialized. We can also argue that a person migrating more than thousand miles for, say, knitting cut piece cloths from far east of India to the farthest west, say, Gujarat, this migration definitely would cause a severe damage to the cultural practices as the person would have to adopt newer cultural praxis as common or essential cultural interfaces and of course along with some superficial ethno-religious practices, what Lull has nucleated as complete root ‘culture’. In terms of social mediation this phenomenon, across traditional class limitations, in the long term would definitely affect individual’s ideology toward his own life pattern. Therefore he has become completely deterritorialized.

Arjun Appadurai argues in this context, ‘...deterritorialization...sometimes...creates exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state. Deterritorialization, whether of Hindus, Sikhs, Palestinians, or Ukranians, is now at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism...’. But this example does not ensure common people’s disorientation toward such, if we at all say fundamentalism in general, because apart from fanatic religious outbreaks, or counter political outbreaks, fundamentalist principles, even after killing innocent mass, still comfortably exist both peripheries in common psyche of general people who do not at all participate in any such practices.

Thus deterritorialization analysis must accept the theoretical process of discourse analysis so that the signification of ‘deterritorialization’, ‘fundamentalism’, ‘symbolic power’ and many other terms can be perpetrated and understood appropriately. However deterritorialization of culture should not claim any importance in a determinate cultural space because ‘class’ analysis even can perform here better than deterritorialization. But on the other hand such deterritorialization motion can well initiate an important debate on globalization of culture. It is not really the postmodernism in the alternative or any such related elitist theories what can rescue popular culture from being either dominated by the nationalist force or transcorporate ‘global’ force. The prime question here to be raised is the people’s struggle and the resultant cultural practice which is completely independent of any given format. If it is political or cultural it would then initiate ideology, as Hall argues, ‘ideology can no longer be seen as a dependent variable, a mere reflection of a pre-given reality in the mind. Nor are its outcomes predictable by derivation from some simple determinist logic. They depend on the balance of forces in a historical conjuncture: on the politics of signification...’.

Culture: Toward a definition of Cultural Power

How do we define or reconcile ‘culture’ however, if it is at all necessary in terms of communication research discourse or in terms of communication of a text in either a micro or macro social perspective? This question is a dubious one and invites a sense of indeterminacy whether to define it in terms of ‘high and low’ culture, ‘suit and street’ culture, ‘orthodox and popular culture’ and so on. All such senses assure an empowered cultural system that involves a long-drawn social hierarchy and domination. One plausible solution is that if ideology is taken off from political and dominant social logic, cultural praxis in micro social format would then be visible. But this specially in a capitalist exploitative society seems to be more evangelical than analytically derived one. But that also seems to be quite aristocratic as it does not care about struggling texts of the audience of underdeveloped countries. Most fundamentally the term ‘culture’ is structurally oppositional to the idea or the study of nature. This is a psychological figuration or pattern that involves ‘tradition’ [comprising of some overriding major proclaimed texts coverting plenty of common narratives], social beliefs [an empowered fall out of ethno-religious and political grand narratives], individual identity, and own territorial feeling [often merged into ethno-religiocity and many other social appearances].

So culture, as often contrarily conceived nowadays, can never be a universal term nor is it having any long historical line-up. Noted cultural theorist Raymond Williams in his “Civilization and Culture” stated culture ‘as a general process of inner development was extended to include a descriptive sense of the means and works of such development...’. Thus Williams strongly proposed the semantic development or transformations of social means or practices into human psychology. Noted Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci while in his note analyzing culture as a middle term between the world of art on the one hand and society and politics on the other.

However toward a plausible definition of culture, in a determinate periphery, one might have to accept overlapping of number of texts regularly happening in political or social frames that might deviate such grand narrative as ‘culture’, otherwise the term can hardly be definable. This is equally true in global frame also, where ‘global culture’ is closely a non-existent phenomenon unless becoming highly dominant and backed by new corporate hegemony. Then only individual audience would consume only information of culture and not the inherent meaning of cultural content or message.

Thus we gradually move on to certain distinctions between ‘popular’ culture and ‘mass’ culture: ‘popular’ when one likes that and ‘mass’ when one does not. But both distinctive features involve a powerful social narrative that accepts any one of the two and wait to its audience while downsizing any deviant approach. Cultural studies thus transcends such binary outlines of cultural distinction, i.e., as mentioned earlier, high and low, popular and mass, suit and street etc. though it must not be misunderstood that it overlooks traditional points of struggle between classes and cultural identities. It more plausibly looks for the atrocities perpetrated over such depressed and low-ordered classes of people. In this course of cultural studies they closely followed Marxian political notion of class and Gramsci’s notion of cultural identification but extended their analysis up to an excorporated emancipation of the exploited class until communist revolution occurs, as cultural studies never denounces such possibilities of revolution.

Raymond Williams (1962) however has provided the most comprehensive definition of culture, as a particular way of life shaped by values, traditions, beliefs, material objects and territory. Culture is a complex and dynamic ecology of people, things, world views, activities, and settings that fundamentally endures but is also changed in routine communication and social interaction [Lull, 1998]. Noted American theorist James Lull has carefully added to this definition that culture is a context. It is how we talk and dress, the food we eat, and how we prepare and consume it, the gods we invent, and the ways we worship them, how we divide up time and space, how we dance, the values to which we socialize our children, and all the other details that make up everyday life. This definition indicates clearly as Lull pointed out also complying with British notion that no culture is inherently superior to any other and that cultural richness by no means derives from economic standing. Culture as everyday life is a steadfastly democratic idea.

The above definition doubtlessly stultifies the textual determinist definition approach of culture and speaks of a complete transtextual stance which also on the other hand negates directly any possibility of political influence on culture thus basically nullifies also democratic institutions, like economy, polity, society, cultural praxis. He also on the other hand, like poststructuralists, has identified that culture is in many ways structured owing to differences in social class. According to Lull, such structuration does not allow variety and scope of culture. His notion of contention with earlier theorists [possibly modernist theorists] is that they ‘have in fact wrestled with the complex connection between social structure and culture for years. In sociology and communication, some theorists have tried to explain why people of various social classes prefer different genres within cultural domains such as art and music’. He continued arguing, why does a young Bengalee prefer Band music while another prefers popular Hindi songs? Does this difference [of taste] show or reveal any connection between ‘class’ and ‘culture’? American Sociologist Herbert Gans has termed such phenomenon as “Taste Culture” that might refer to cultural strata in a social structure. This taste culture has a definite and direct relations with the social class position. Thus the people of upper socio-economic class prefer classical music than that of lower socio-economic class [Gans, 1974]. However French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tried to derivate the problematic relationship between cultural taste and social class positions. In his words, ‘social space is made in social practice, and practice is not determined by social structure. What a person learns culturally is influenced by, but not limited to, the tastes and everyday activities of people who occupy the same social class’.

But the definition of culture still hardly depends on the inferences of different cultural observatories which deal only some preferred cultural genres. So intertextual analyses cannot reach the core of such truth rather invites a neo-liberal counter-structural [mostly mediated] domination. If culture is an assemblage of a number of socio-cultural texts, then these must be released from its base social structures. But this release does not mean sundering between social structure and cultural texts. The most appropriate definition of culture lets these two have mutual responsibility to each other and have developmental relationship also between them. Then only social domination over the structure as “culture” can be avoided.

Culture and power:

Thus if the imperative is to take institutional intervention in cultural activities in a social context into account, the question of power and hegemony would then definitely come forward to shape the edifice of culture. Institutional domination rather intervention can be identified in various ways, like, economic power, political power, coercive power [militarization] that would determine the rules of social space. Structural theorists are interested in these powers and their domination over the signs and texts. But American sociologists have identified another notion of power, i.e., symbolic power, that can be defined, as ‘the capacity to use symbolic forms...to intervene in and influence the course of action or events’[Lull, 1998]. This power also can be institutionalized as mass media organizations, corporate communicative orgnizations. Lull points out beautifully that, the ‘symbolic power and its correlate cultural power, deriving from the tactical undertakings of social actors constructing their everyday lives, are not exercized solely by social institutions. Symbolic and cultural power are far more accessible and usable than are economic, political and other institutional coercive attempts. They are central to daily life, helping us to create, cope with, adapt to, and transform environments structured by forces of economic, political and military authority’. Mass media are the main players exerting cultural power. Cultural power, according to Lull, is the ‘ability to define a situation culturally. By cultural power individual or groups produce meanings to construct ways of life’.

As I have already pointed out that such identifications basically represent a counter hegemony or power alternative to traditional institutional power structures. However Lull, even not being over obsessively concerned to such power analysis, at the same time, has established also the legitimacy of the symbolic or cultural power.

However both Marxian studies, cultural studies [poststructural studies], and American symbolic analyses have expressed their concern to the growth of power culture empowered by homogeneous institutional domination. Marxian studies in its classical version rather communist orientation have strongly expressed about political emancipation of exploited working class toward establishment of dictatorship of the proletariat. Cultural studies have shown a lot more concern about the exploitation of individuality and organized terror against socio-cultural texts perpetrated by traditional institutions. On the other hand American symbolic analysis is also based on the development of neo-liberal outlook of symbolic-cultural texts that are supposed to achieve independence from any traditionalist power structure, though it is equally very keen to recognize unleashing growth of technology and corporate neo-liberalism in the world.

Both cultural and symbolic power contents have the single source of origin in neo-liberal mediation wherefrom people get these elements as a further [second order] empowered homogenized concept and ensure their optimal use. In this context some amount of indigenous traditional outlook toward those contents influence the production of meaning for the time being. These traditional outlooks are very much territory-specific in its character. A young beautiful Indian lady may be very much fond of funky dress codes and may alongside prefer white ‘saree’ during Durga Puja festival. Gans’s ‘taste culture’ theory can hardly explain such phenomenon whereas Lull’s ‘hybridization of culture’ is just a mere observation and Foucault’s culture is just a ‘causal expression’ but none of them look for the dynamic transformational development of such cultural texts overlapping one over another, and a complete deterritorialization of ‘self’ or ‘culture’ toward absolute consumerism would then be prevalent perpetually. Individual then would be least interested to get meaning of those contents, they rather prefer to consume the information only what is being incessantly communicated to them.

Howsoever the notion of cultural power involves how people use the mediated symbols and become compulsively identified as members of some sub-cultural identities, like, popular culture, street culture, suit culture or elite culture, proletariat culture, and by some opinions mass culture.

Culture and Power # II: Popular culture versus mass culture:

People often not able to identifying the underlying power exercise, think ‘mass’ culture same as popular culture. James Lull while defining ‘popular’ has stated that popular, in this sense, does not signify widespread, mainstream, dominant, or commercially successful. Popular cultural texts come from people and are developed from people’s creations, nor is it given to them for temporary or permanent use. James Lull again has stated very loosely that, “this perspective tears away at distinctions between producers and consumers of cultural artifacts, between culture industries and contexts of reception. We all produce popular culture. Constructing popular culture is an exercise in cultural power”. No point is required to counter this statement but lot of concern still is left to the growth of culture industries and dominant commercial elements that affect individual creativity and dynamic ecology of natural cultural elements. Individual creativity often becomes badly influenced by such dominant elements that definitely affect the course of natural creation and popular culture, as the traditional popular folk cultural forms and identities are the worst sufferers from the culture industries. Nowadays traditional string puppeteers of Bengal set puppet costumes, make-ups, screenplays concommitant to the mediated agenda of Mumbai or Kolkata film [culture] industries, thus try hard or fight a lost battle before getting completely extincted.

Now whatever be the fate of popular cultural creations, the definition, what Lull has attempted to produce, would remain perfect in contrast to the ‘mass’ culture. Mass culture basically is a derivated or fall out of some cultural aspects that are formally recognized as a ‘mainstream’, commercially viable, widely mediated, not widely supported but less opposed, ‘national’, ‘central’, etc. If the government builds a bridge or a flyover, often these are dedicated to the nation and the bridge becomes ‘national’ and, at the same time, may be a symbol of pride, power, development that all feed to the ‘national cultural power’ where the population [comprising of all strata, including lower middle class, poor, destitutes, remote dwellers, share croppers, landless farmers, rural unemlpoyeds, highly exploited female workers, industrial workers, refugees, homeless, raped, unemployeds, retrenched, looted, thieves, murderers, convicted, beggers, vagabonds, evicted alongside rich, super rich, educated elites, upper middle class, educated middle class etc.] largely becomes an ‘atomized mass’ irrespective of the plurality of their cultural identities or even class identities to some extent.

Theoretically mass culture do not possess or deserve any better theoretical categorization, but is existent as a subcultural form in any organized cultural power where powerful institutions always intervene in social process more as educator manner than developer, thus available almost in all the phases of modern history so far noticed.

Culture and Power # III: Cultural power and mediation:

American sociologists including media analysts strongly believe that mass media contribute to the process of popular [mass-]-cultural production by distributing cultural resources to oppressed individuals and subordinate groups [Lull, p73]. This is nothing but a sheer fabricated media-idealism that aptly discards the truth. Moreover such contribution of media were seen, in ex-colonial countries, in the developmental paradigmatic phase where media were centrally controlled and regulated. But this phase so far the developing countries had experienced, were by and large incomplete and they also innately felt for the autonomy of media, independent of state controlling. Subsequently media-market expanded to a large extent but squeezed to the oppressed and also the earlier promise of distributing resources to them. Media market becomes largely monolithic in terms of profit maximization [political eonomy] sundering developing countries not only from its traditional roots but from the contemporarity of cultural praxis also.

Edward Said’s narrative on America’s most unpopular war in Vietnam is most worth mentioning here. America’s defeat in Vietnam in mid-sixties has become most so-called popular cultural resource that let the term commercially alive “America’s war in Vietnam”. In India also, with such so-called popular mediated resource as, ‘India is shining’, ‘India: the upcoming superpower’, ‘the superpower of 21st century’ — global media conglomerates, operating in India, along with Indigenous films and other discursive pratices, have invented a very powerful discourse on ‘new’ India that is commercially suited and placed on a highest elite positioning. While Said strongly advocated Foucault’s open ended thought of power, how is power exercised and what are its effects — that set a basic ideation to the notion that ‘what is power and where does it come from?’ In terms of global mediation these questions have a homogeneous turn toward conglomeration of media institutions that is the prime source of power in the 21st century world terrorizing people’s [Foucauldian] right to hold power in contrast to that of the ruling class and media institutions. This is cultural power as James Lull stated, and people have the only option to imitate those mediated symbols. So this cultural power is negative and would outcast people’s creative power and ‘right’ to be productive, and encourage instead only packaging so to consume mass produced media content, regardless of its specificity of meaning. Baudrillard’s conclusion here is worth reading: “media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. Television is ‘real world’; television is dissolved into life; and life is dissolved into television. The fiction is ‘realized’ and the real becomes fictions. Simulation has replaced production [medium is the message]...alas, our individuality, always in the spotlight, is that and only that, in the spotlight. The spotlight functionalizes the human being. The social limits of the spotlight and playing to the spotlight are the individual. The social framework and its communicative action are the self. There is no freedom beyond this activity. We are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle...”.

Popular Culture as Postmodern Culture: I Shop Therefore I Am

The Film Run Lola Run: Life on a crossroad

Popular culture is being widely defined in recent years in terms of postmodernity incidentally by the urban civil identities of many ambitious third world nations precisely Indian social centres. With the adventurous growth of global mediation the gross definition of popular ‘social’ culture has evidently been fragmented into certain inter-temporal but globalist symbolic cultural artifacts as newer codifications of life patterns. The postmodernity of culture in a certain periphery is therefore guided by an imposition of those symbolic globalist cultural artifacts on the locally operative cultural space. Postmodernity can thus be worked out as a post-theoretical condition that overrules traditional cultural contours i.e. ruling culture, deviant culture, oppositional culture and even grossly the popular culture. It also transcends all kinds of traditional social and cultural identity demarcations, like authentic culture, suite culture, street culture, commercial culture etc. But alongside the known elements of regional popular culture one must have a clear idea about what is postmodernism or postmodernity and its association with the popular or contemporary culture.

Immediately after the second world war lots of research works were organized in the United States that challenged all moots of traditional modernist development of society, literature, and of course the popular culture. Number of theorists has worked so far on postmodernism and postmodern culture, notably Fredric Jameson, Jean Francois Lyotard et.al. towards a definable, notional release of individual identity from all possible social and political dominations.

Defining Postmodernity

However Jean Francois Lyotard in his “The condition of postmodernity” (1979, translated in English, 1984) has defined postmodern condition as, ‘a crisis in the status of knowledge in western societies’ that overrule all metanarrative apparatus of legitimation, rejecting all totalizing frameworks from telling universalist stories (metanarratives), Marxism, Liberalism, Christianity etc. [Storey, 2001]. Postmodernism according to Lyotard thus rejects all such metanarratives used to dominate, homogenize other voices, opinions, discourses, and other forms of plurality in the name of universal principles. In postmodern condition, heterogeneity or plurality thus rules over the universality and homogeneity of narratives i.e. values, ‘ism’s, ‘logy’s etc.

The annulations of metanarratives as grand narratives in postmodernity however reveals something more than what is commonly understood in terms of the fragmentation of grand narrative. Postmodernity unlike the French Poststructurality here prescribes a plausible post-semiotic outcome of every such critique of the modernist references. This is the most problematic and viscid area of the understanding of postmodernity anywhere other than literary creations. Postmodernity cannot rest in a poststructural indeterminacy but needs a postcommercial or hyperreal space to render the mediated form of the signified of a text.

Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies depend on such metanarratives as grand narratives. The basic tenets of postmodernity therefore reveals that every attempt to create an “order” always calls for an alternative creation of a “disorder,” of an equal dimension, but a “grand narrative” shadows such constructive disorders. Postmodernism while rejecting such metanarratives as grand narratives, welcomes thus “micro-narratives,” micro-stories that explain individual praxis, events, rather than Universalist or globalist concepts. Postmodern “micro-narratives” are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability (Sarup).

In terms of ‘post-codification’ postmodernity can be quite well differentiated from ‘cultural studies’ though both deal with individuality and its cultural developments. Individuality, in cultural studies, largely takes the form of a counter-hegemonic to the modernist institutional legacy of domination but does not ignore the possibility of political unification of the mass. Their counter-hegemony though rejects structural metanarratives or grand narratives, involves a greater installation of plurality in popular cultural praxis. 

But postmodernity on the other hand not only rejects Universalist metanarratives but gives also a plausible and at the same time quite utopian end of a ‘disorder’ wherein reality, according to them, may occasionally exist. The counter hegemonic individual does not prefer postmodern ‘disorderly chaos’ that needs support of hyperreal ‘postconsumerism’ to establish itself. Cultural studies inherits ‘ideology’ independent of any political metanarrative, say, ‘base and superstructure’ but indeed political and further directs people to organize struggle.

Genealogy of postmodernity

While tracing out the genealogy of postmodernist thought one must rediscover and redefine the course of historicism that tells us outright development of modernism along with massive optimistic development of science and of course social science. ‘Modernist thought had its successful origins and developments in the European Enlightenment period. This era was sharply demarcated by a celebration of the liberating potentials of the social sciences, the materialistic gains of capitalism, new forms of rational thought, due process safeguards, abstract rights applicable to all, and the individual it was a time of great optimism (Milovanovic, 1992a, 1994a; Dews, 1987; Sarup, 1989; Lyotard, 1984; Baker, 1993).

Postmodernists are fundamentally opposed to such modernist thought. Sensitized by the insights of some of the classical thinkers, ranging from Marx, to Weber, to Durkheim, Freud, and the critical thought of the Frankfurt School, postmodernist thought emerged with a new intensity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Let us wage a war on totality” stated one of its key exponents (Lyotard, 1984: 82). Most of the key concepts of modernist thought were critically examined and found to be wanting. Entrenched bureaucratic powers, monopolies, the manipulative advertisement industry, dominant and totalizing discourses, and the ideology of the legal apparatus were seen as exerting repressive powers. In fact, the notion of the individual free, self-determining, reflective, and the center of activity was seen as an ideological construction, nowhere more apparent than in the notion of the juridical subject, the so-called reasonable man in law. Rather than the notion of the individual, the centered subject, the postmodernists were to advocate the notion of the decentered subject’ (Dragan Milovanovic).

Baudrillard on postmodernity

According to one of the most vibrant theorists of poststructurality, Jean Baudrillard, postmodernity is not simply a culture of sign, rather it is a culture of ‘simulacrum’, i.e., introspective identical copy that transcending the original text determinacy, on what Walter Benjamin has reiterated that, mechanical reproduction has destroyed the ‘aura’ of the work of art. Baudrillard’s notion was the long drawn distinctions between original and the copy has now been virtually destroyed, and so the geo-social space and the relative metanarratives. This, according to Baudrillard, is the simulation process. Basically, as simulation is expressed, all the recorded contents, like film, music, are nothing but a copy without the original. John Storey has added that a film is a construction made from editing together film footage shots in different times and spaces. Baudrillard’s simulation is the hyperreal regeneration of a reality text in absense of its original identity and hyperrealism is the characteristic mode of postmodernity, where in its realm the distinction between simulation and the ‘real’ implodes in which real and imaginary gradually collapse into each other (Storey, 2001). Also in this way French poststructuralism merged into the conditions postmodernity. What is still important here is to note that, according to Baudrillard, simulation is getting more and more real than the real. It can perform even better than what the real does. This is also where media operate so powerfully, because it leads people to simulate the real more importantly than the event. So even been badly defeated in Vietnam war in Sixties, American film industry could still manage to let the simulation alive in favour of US Army in number of Hollywood productions over years.

Baudrillard then made simulation analyses forward to rediscover ‘Disneyland’ that justified postmodern culture quite effectively but left a great utopian space activated also. In his words, ‘...Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the society in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real’.

Another one of the most influencial analysts of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism and Consumer Society, has pointed out postmodernity as a condition where the erosion occurred in the older distinctions between high culture and mass culture or popular culture. Thus postmodernity transcends the traditional vested interest that has been preserved in the realm of high culture. According to Jameson in the realm of moderity [high modernity] popular culture has been brutally influenced institutionally toward high cultural praxis. Postmodernism according to Jameson, breaks any particularity or form of popular culture. It thus releases all popularly emerged texts from traditional or conventional motivation and pressure. Jameson argues these cultural texts as a ‘periodizing concept’ and is dominant in the neo-liberal economic and cultural paradigm what he has termed ‘postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism’ that connotes neo-liberal transnational development of capitalism in the contemporary age of globalization. In this context Ernest Mandel’s trial of three stages of development of capitalism is to be considered: ‘market capitalism’, ‘monopoly capitalism’, ‘late or multinational or transnational capitalism’. Jameson while referring these stages of capitalist development into his cultural schema ‘Realism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’, argues that capitalism in its last category puts forward the purest form of capital into the uncommodified areas (Storey, 2001).

The question of historical transformation toward postmodernity:

Now to reach the core of such transformation of historical periods either from market to transnational orientation of capitalist development or from cultural ‘realism’ to ‘postmodernism’ a plausible alternative schema is needed other than typical historical metanarratives. Here in this context postmodernism differs sharply from cultural studies. Even though traditionally empowered historical metanarratives are being rejected by both postmodernism and cultural studies, there is a major difference between these rejections. For Raymond Williams the transformation of historical periods does not entail complete structural destruction of previous cultural codes and installation of a new one. It simply may cause a paradigmatic shift of ‘relative cultural codes’ that may involve a massive transformation of ruling of popular culture what we can denote different phases of dominant codes. Jameson in this context argues that postmodern condition is basically ‘the cultural dominant’ of late or transnational or neo-liberal [economic] capitalism that along with the free movement of capital delimiting newer cultural boundaries across national borders, calls for emancipation of cultural texts welcomes indeterminacy which is independent of its traditional signification process. But what is still worth mentioning about Jameson’s notion in this context is that postmodern dominant culture belongs to the western capitalist societies which have achieved hierarchy in both economic and popular cultural praxis, otherwise postmodernism and postmodern culture has also been characterized in many ways, such as, ‘Pastiche culture’, ‘culture of quotations’, culture of flatness or depthlessness, superficial in most literate sense, i.e. free from meaning etc. However, according to Jameson, postmodernity or postmodern culture is hopelessly a commercial culture typically promotes consumerist capitalism.