The exercise of hegemony in contemporary culture and media

Frederic Jameson, in his Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, captures three cri- tical historical junctures of capitalism and their respective cultural tempers: the market capitalism of the 1840s whose cultural logic was realism; the mono- poly capitalism of the 1890s whose expression was modernism; and the latest and current phase of multinational capitalism of the 1940s which brings us to what for many of us may be the uncomfortable realm of postmodernism. Scholars like Vivian Sobchak have extrapolated on this schema to propose the dominant cultural instrumentality of each of these phases: the photo- graphic exemplifying the mood of realism under market capitalism; the cinematic dominating the sensibility of modernism under monopoly capi- talism; and the electronic pervading the contemporary, postmodern phase.