Chuck Palaniuk's. The fight club

The Fight Club

"A world defeated by materialism: Have we lost the fight?"

What is that human beings are living at the begining of XXI century in western society? Is it a kind of deja-vu the monster we are facing in our present day world?

Postmodernism tells us it is the way the message is transmited what is really important. But what about the constant invasion we fight since the very first moment we wake up every day?

Chuck Palaniuk's The fight club shows us a world where a huge materialism is alive, a world where postmodernism take place in almost every corner, but what is postmodernism?

Postmodernism is differentiated from other cultural forms by its emphasis on fragmentation. Fragmentation of the subject replaces the alienation of the subject which characterized modernism. Postmodernism is concerned with all surface, no substance. There is a loss of the center. Postmodernist works are often characterized by a lack of depth, a flatness. The liberation from the anxiety may also mean a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings are now free-floating and impersonal. Also distinctive of the late capitalist age is its focus on commodification and the recycling of old images and commodities. A prime example of this is Warhol's work, as well as Warhol himself. Jameson refers to this cultural recycling as historicism - the random cannibalization of all styles of the past. It is an increasing primacy of the 'neo' and a world transformed into sheer images of itself. the actual organic tie of history to past events is being lost.

All of these cultural forms are indicative of postmodernism, late capitalism, or what Jameson calls present-day multinational capitalism. Jameson claims that there has been a radical shift in our surrounding material world and the ways in which it works. He refers to an architectural example, a postmodern building Symbolic of the multinational world space which we function in daily. We, the human subjects who occupy this new space have not kept pace with the evolution which produced it. There has been a mutation in the object, as well as a mutation in human beings themselves.

Palaniuk's work is an excellent conduit for an analysis of Fredric Jameson's theories. First Jameson wrote about a linguistic schizofrenia “a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning”, eventually we realise the main character and narrator of Palaniuk's work is victim of a clinic schizofrenia which also affects the way the character looks symbols. A sign consists of at least two parts, the signifier and the signified, which share a relationship whereby the signified is a ‘meaning-effect’ “produced by the interrelationship of material signifiers. Jameson argues that the schizophrenic condition occurs when there is a collapse in the relations of one signified to another. As a result of this collapse we are left with a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers. This disruption in language produces two main effects, both of which are keenly present in Fight Club, for example when the main character attends to group

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