simulation

We can easily understand the cultural logic inherent in the global financial crisis as a 'world historical moment,' a moment where the very tenets of globalization and mediation are being challenged at their most underlying theoretical core. However, the event also must be understood as the first global event that is wholly and uniformly a postmodern crisis. In the financial collapse of the banking and credit systems we see the most fundamental aspects of postmodernism revealing itself in material reality. I examine the crisis and how it is ultimately perfectly predicted and consummated in the ontological works of Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition), the global theories of Baudrillard (The Precession of Simulcra) and the mind–politics of Foucault (Discipline and Punish). I argue that high Modernism has remained the dominant socio–cultural mode despite the emergence of mainstream postmodern theory in the 1970s, but with the global capitalistic system in greater flux theoretically than ever before we are glimpsing the ultimate death of the last Grand Narrative in modern history. After the death of God (Nietzsche), the death of dialectic (Fukuyama, Zizek, Baudrillard), and now with the possibility of the death of late capitalism we find ourselves at another cultural cross–roads, one that can only find refuge in simulation.