Fight Club Pomo

Andrew Croome
acroome@rocketmail.com
Fight Club and postmodernism.
The fundamental concern of David Fincher’s 1999 film, Fight Club, namely
the nature of the human subject under postmodernity, makes it an excellent conduit
for an analysis of Fredric Jameson’s theories on both schizophrenia and the
possibilities for politically effective art under multinational capitalism. The fact that
the text is first and foremost a commodity and yet simultaneously functions as a
critique of commodity is an important contradiction, one which reveals firstly the
power of late capitalism to neutralise its subversion through the processes of
consumption, and secondly the near impossibility of an expression of cognitive
mapping to have any effect when contained within an artistic form.
For argument’s sake, because of the nature of both Jameson’s work and the
political stance of the text Fight Club, this essay will take a negative view of
postmodernity.
Based on Chuck Palahniuk’s 19961 novel of the same title, Fincher’s film is
the story of an un-named narrator, played by Edward Norton, and his eventual
realisation that he is a literal schizophrenic. Tyler Durden, the narrators split
personality (played by Brad Pitt) comes to lead a proto-fascist group labelled Project
Mayhem, which seeks to awaken society to the errors of consumer and material
culture. Importantly the film was financed by a major Hollywood production house,
Fox 2000 Pictures,2 and David Fincher is a veteran player in the language of
consumption, having directed advertisements for companies such as Nike, Coca-Cola,
Budweiser, Heineken, Pepsi, Levi's, Converse, AT & T, and Chanel.3
Frederic Jameson’s concept of schizophrenia can be used as a tool in reaching
an understanding of the thoughts and actions of certain characters in Fight Club, first
and foremostly those of the narrator and his alter ego Tyler Durden. In two related
articles Postmodernism and Consumer Society and Postmodernism, or The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism Jameson defines his ideas on the schizophrenic nature of the
postmodern subject.
Jameson characterises schizophrenia as primarily a breakdown in language,
followed subsequently by collapses in both the notions of time and identity. He draws
1
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. ( New York: Random House, 1996 ).
2
The Internet Movie Database. “Fight Club” URL: http://us.imdb.com/Companies?0137523 , 2002.
3
The Internet Movie Database. “David Fincher Biography” URL:
http://us.imdb.com/Bio?Fincher,+David, 2002.
1/9
Andrew Croome
on Lacan’s theories of schizophrenia to mould his own almost metaphoric version of

the disorder, which he argues remains true to the primary tenet of Lacan’s ideas,
namely that schizophrenia can be viewed as “a breakdown in the signifying chain, that
is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a
meaning.”4 He believes that within postmodernity this breakdown manifests itself as
a disruption in the creation of meaning from language. Taking the view that a sign
consists of at least two parts, the signifier and the signified, which share a many-to-
many relationship whereby the signified is a ‘meaning-effect’ “produced by the
interrelationship of material signifiers”5; 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.”6 This disruption in language produces two main effects, both of which are
keenly present in Fight Club.
The first of these effects, a breakdown in the concept of time, stems from the
fact that temporal relationships are, as Jameson argues, “a function of language.”7 He
argues that the temporal ordering of past, present and future can no longer exist, and
as such the schizophrenic is condemned to live in a world without past or future, one
where moments can only occur in the perpetual present.8 The use of the term
‘perpetual present’ is perhaps an inappropriate one. If language can no longer
determine the concepts ‘past’ and ‘future’, how can it construct any idea of the
‘present’; a term which surely relies on an oppositional relationship to past/future in
its own definition? Perhaps a more suited term would not rely on temporal ordering,
maybe ‘perpetual existence’ or ‘perpetual being.’ As will be illustrated, part of Fight
Club’s method for expressing this temporal dissolution within the postmodern
individual relates to the concept of Insomnia.
The second result of the breakdown in language, arguably a subsequent effect
of the collapse of time as an organising idiom, is the failure of the postmodern subject
to construct for themselves a fixed identity. As Jameson argues “personal identity is
4
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. P 72.
5
Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster ( Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983 ) P 119.
6
Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ New Left Review, 146
(July/August 1984) P 72.
7
8
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism and Consumer Society. P 119.
2/9
Andrew Croome
itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future…”9 He believes
that if the subject cannot order their past and future, then identity cannot be
constructed in the traditional biographical experience of the self over time. Thus, for
the postmodern individual, identity must be sought through other means, in a way
which does not require time as an regulatory construct. One way in which identity
can be constructed in the absence of time is through the processes of consumption; by
allowing the processes of commodification and commodity ownership to function as a
substitute for identity.
These ideas present themselves in Fight Club in a number of different ways.
The first part of the film, before our narrator meets his saviour in Tyler Durden, is
spent illustrating the type of existence the Edward Norton character has been
enduring. He describes in acute detail his suffering under an Insomnia-like disorder,
and the as yet un-perceived pointlessness of his existence. Standing above a
photocopier and staring into space, Norton’s character says “With insomnia nothing’s
real. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.”10 He says “When you have insomnia
you’re never really asleep and you’re never really awake.”11 The narrator works as a
travelling car-crash inspector for a major car company, spending his time either in the
office, his condo, or in the transient temporary spaces of the airport lounge and jet
plane. His environment becomes devoid of spatial logic as he constantly wakes in
different airports, seemingly appearing from nowhere – “You wake up at Boeing
Field. You wake up at LAX.”12 Within this repetitious existence temporal order
becomes less and less meaningful until he reaches the point where – “I was living in a
state of perpetual deja-vu. Everywhere I went it felt like I’d already been there.”13
The narrator cannot envision any kind of future, claiming “You do the job you’re
trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don’t understand any of it, and then
you just die.”14 He does not speak about his past, he does not define himself through
biographical information, through his parents, family or friends. His day to day living
mirrors almost perfectly Jameson’s description of the schizophrenic “condemned to
9
10
Fincher, David. (Director) Fight Club, Fox 2000 Pictures, 1999.
11
Fincher, David. (Director) Fight Club.
12
Palahniuk, Chuck. P 29.
13
14
3/9
Andrew Croome
live in a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have
little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon.”15
Living in a “filing cabinet for widows and young professionals” ironically
sign-posted as ‘A Place to be Somebody’, Norton’s character has no identity in the
traditional time-dependent sense. Instead his identity is constructed through
commodity ownership. In one scene Norton’s character walks through his condo,
speaking on the phone to IKEA, while behind him pieces of furniture materialise with
price labels and catalogue descriptions superimposed on them. As he describes, these
commodities act to construct his identity: “Like so many others I had become a slave
to the IKEA nesting instinct.”16 He wonders “What kind of dining set defines me as a
person?”17 In describing his relationship to these objects he says “The people I know
who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with
their IKEA furniture catalogue.”18 He describes the enormous pull he feels towards
these commodities, arguably the result of the instant identity substitute they offer him:
“The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that. The Klipsk
shelving unit, oh, yeah.”19 When his condo explodes and he looses the commodities
he has worked so hard to obtain he laments: “That was not just a bunch of stuff that
got destroyed, it was me.”20
Fight Club makes obvious that, in a schizophrenic existence, it is the idea of
commodity which offers tangible identity. As David Ashley states in his article
Hyper-Commodification and the Fragmentation of the Self, “Under the conditions of
consumer capitalism, many people truly believe that they can establish a worthwhile
identity on the basis of sumptuary consumption.”21 Importantly space too can also be
considered a commodity. In The City as Commodity, Mark Goodwin argues “The
selling of urban lifestyle…becomes part and parcel of an increasingly sophisticated
commodification of everyday life.”22 When his condo is wrecked Norton’s character
chooses not to rebuild his existence around such a commodified, exclusive space, but
15
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism and Consumer Society. P 119.
16
17
18
19
20
21
Ashley, David. ‘Hyper Commodification and the Fragmentation of the Self’ in History without a
Subject ( Colorado: Westview Press, 1997 ) P 233.
22
Goodwin, Mark. ‘The City as Commodity.’ Selling Places, The City as Cultural Capital, Past and
Present (Oxford: Pregamon Press, 1993) P 147.
4/9
Andrew Croome
instead moves to Paper St, a ruined crumbling house set amongst the city’s industrial
complex. The film creates an opposition between its narrator’s life lived under highly
commodified space, and the narrator’s life after his rejection of this space, and
subsequent occupation of what is a simpler, almost bohemian, existence at Paper St.
Fight Club seems to support many of Jameson’s ideas on the schizophrenic
nature of the postmodern subject, and the inherent breakdowns in both time and
identity which occur as a result. One of the major concerns of the text is also the
possibility and manner by which the postmodern subject can reject such an existence,
and the political results of their actions. Thus the text is also an excellent starting
point for a reflection on Jameson’s theories of cognitive mapping, and for an
argument which believes the radical power of any cognitive mapping will always be
undercut by the commodified nature of art under capitalism.
Jameson’s ideas on cognitive mapping centre around the possible nature of
politically effective art under the system of late capitalism. The theory is informed by
his observation that the art of people like Andy Warhol, whose work explicitly
foregrounds commodity fetishism,23 does not seem to be the ‘powerful and critical’
political statement which it perhaps ought to be. Jameson worries about a culture in
which “even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash, are all somehow
secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be
considered a part…”24 This kind of nullification of political effect can also be seen in
the work of bands like Rage Against the Machine, in the commodification of the
image of Che Guevara, and also, as will be returned to later, the effects of a film like
Fight Club. He suggests that one of the reasons for this loss of political power is the
loss of the postmodern individual’s ability to locate themselves spatially,25 to locate
their position within what he terms postmodern hyperspace. He argues we have lost
the capacity “map the great global multinational and decentered communicational
network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”26 What he seems
to suggest is that the postmodern subject has simply lost its way, has become
confused and bewildered in the face of a system of such grand and seemingly un-
mappable complexity. The solution, then, is simply to draw for the postmodern
subject a cognitive map, to illustrate to them how the world functions and what is
23
24
25
26
5/9
Andrew Croome
their place in it. Thus Jameson argues for an artistic aesthetic he terms ‘cognitive
mapping’, one which foregrounds cognitive and pedagogical concerns, and “in which
we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and
regain a capacity to act and struggle…”27 He believes that politically effective art
under postmodernism should have as its goal the projection of a global cognitive
mapping,28 one which wakes the postmodern subject from their confusion and sets
them on a course towards radical and collective political action.
The link between this theory and the text Fight Club can be found in the
dogma espoused by Tyler Durden, in the function and ideology of the fight clubs, and
also in the teachings of the aptly titled Project Mayhem.
Tyler’s role in the film’s narrative is to break the narrator from his
schizophrenic existence. Slowly but surely he weans Norton’s character from his
heavy reliance on commodity. He tells him “We are consumers. We are by-products
of the life-style obsession…Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me.
What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels,
some guy’s name on my underwear…It’s all going down man, so fuck off with your
sofa units. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let’s evolve.”29
He explains how “the things you own end up owning you,”30 and allows the narrator
to move into the squalid, commodity free, bohemian space of Paper St. As an already
‘enlightened’ soul Tyler’s position becomes one of teaching and guidance, he takes a
pedagogical relationship towards the narrator, showing him more and more about how
the world functions, showing him more and more about his ‘real’ identity. This
manifests itself in many scenes, one of the most important being that of the chemical
burn. “This is a chemical burn,”31 Tyler tells the narrator whilst pinning his hand to a
kitchen table and burning it with a mixture of lye and water. Norton’s character
writhes under the unbearable pain while Tyler dramatically demands that before he
neutralises the burn the narrator must “Know, not fear, know, that someday you’re
going to die,”32 saying “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do
27
28
29
30
31
32
6/9
Andrew Croome
anything.”33 This pedagogical policy continues as Tyler attempts to teach the

members of fight club their place is the world.
Tyler’s speech to fight club –
“An entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables. Slaves with
white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working
jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle
children of history, no purpose, no place. We have no great war,
no great depression. Our great war’s a spiritual war. Our great depression
is our lives. [beat] We’ve all been raised on television to believe that
one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we
34
won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact, and we’re very, very pissed off.”
Tyler’s teachings attempt to snap his students from their postmodern, arguably
meaningless, existence. He teaches them “You are not your job. You are not how
much money you make…You are not the contents of your wallet.”35 Under Project
Mayhem he challenges their notions of identity, shouting through a megaphone “You
are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”36 Through this
mapping of their place in the world, the participants of Project Mayhem are able to
struggle together and act collectively. Their political acts include the defacement of
corporate art, the destruction of luxury cars, the systematic breaking of television
ariels, and the painting of large yellow smiley faces on the side of apartment
buildings. In Project Mayhem, under Tyler’s teachings, the underclass finds the will
to join together as a single unit. As Tyler explains – “We cook your meals, we haul
your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you
sleep. Do not fuck with us.”37 In order for this collective action to occur Tyler’s
mission becomes to provide his subjects with information which will allow them to
cognitively map their place in the world. Importantly, the audience is also privy to
this information, which bring us to a discussion on the ways in which this proposed
cognitive mapping seems to be undercut by the processes which commodify artistic
product.
First and foremost Fight Club is a commodity. The content of the text is arguably
irrelevant to its inevitable commodification as a product under capitalism. This
encoding as commodity is a process which occurs outside of the film; in the methods
33
34
35
36
37
7/9
Andrew Croome
of its distribution, in its presentation to the audience, in the posters and merchandise
and promotional materials. As Marla Misek points out in EMedia Magazine,38
months of design and effort went in to creating the packaging for the film’s DVD
release, making it one of the most complex and visually stimulating packages on the
market. In purchasing the DVD the viewer is purchasing a commodity, which, as we
have seen, acts to shape their identity. If Fight Club is a film promoting the rejection
of consumer culture, then the viewer is ‘adding’ to their identity a rejection of the
very processes by which this identity augmentation occurs, namely those of
consumption. The act is fundamentally contradicting. As suggested previously the
text seems to be secretly disarmed of its critical power, the audience cannot seem to
use it as an aid in any true rejection of commodity culture. The abolition of critical
distance is one reason Jameson puts forward in an attempt to understand this
disarmament. He argues “distance in general (including critical distance in particular)
has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism.”39 If a text
cannot criticise from outside of the system, then it has no choice but to become part of
that system, thus incorporation the act of criticism within the system it seeks to
criticise. What is important to note is that a film like Fight Club, which as has been
argued might contain something of a cognitive mapping, cannot achieve critical
distance from the postmodern system it seeks to attack and therefore will always be
encoded as a commodity. Just because a text takes on Jameson’s cognitive mapping
aesthetic does not mean it can in any way escape the postmodern system, and
therefore becomes just as politically idle as the image of Che Guevara.
In conclusion, Fight Club provides good ground for an analysis and legitimation of
Jameson’s theories of the schizophrenic nature of postmodern existence. The film
depicts crisis’s in both time and identity, which manifest themselves within it’s
narrative as concepts like Insomnia and the proliferation of consumer products. Fight
Club’s attempts to illustrate how its subjects escape from their postmodern situation
can be seen as a possible incarnation of Jameson’s call for a political aesthetic of
cognitive mapping. The film arguably also serves to show how cognitive mapping is
itself made useless as a political tool, due to the near impossibility of any text
escaping encodification as commodity, and thereby reaching any kind of distance
from which to criticise.
38
Misek, Marla. EMedia Magazine, Nov 2001, v14, p27.
39
8/9
Andrew Croome
WORKS CITED
Ashley, David. ‘Hyper Commodification and the Fragmentation of the Self’ in History
without a Subject ( Colorado: Westview Press, 1997 )
Fincher, David. (Director) Fight Club, Fox 2000 Pictures, 1999.
Goodwin, Mark. ‘The City as Commodity.’ Selling Places, The City as Cultural
Capital, Past and Present (Oxford: Pregamon Press, 1993)
Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in The Anti-Aesthetic:

Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster ( Port Townsend, Washington: Bay
Press, 1983)
Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ New

Left Review, 146, (July/August 1984)
Misek, Marla. EMedia Magazine, Nov 2001, v14, p27.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. ( New York: Random House, 1996 ).
The Internet Movie Database. “David Fincher Biography” URL:

http://us.imdb.com/Bio?Fincher,+David, 2002.
The Internet Movie Database. “Fight Club” URL:

http://us.imdb.com/Companies?0137523 , 2002.
9/9

Fight Club Pomo

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Fight Club Pomo

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Andrew Croome

Fight Club and postmodernism.

on Lacan’s theories of schizophrenia to mould his own almost metaphoric version of

anything.”33 This pedagogical policy continues as Tyler attempts to teach the

Tyler’s speech to fight club –

Fincher, David. (Director) Fight Club, Fox 2000 Pictures, 1999.

Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in The Anti-Aesthetic:

Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ New

Misek, Marla. EMedia Magazine, Nov 2001, v14, p27.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. ( New York: Random House, 1996 ).

The Internet Movie Database. “David Fincher Biography” URL:

The Internet Movie Database. “Fight Club” URL:

You might also like