Art-historical period concepts fail because cultural change has no real beginnings or endings

Evidence

Thus it has been art history, and in particular Wölfflin’s “art history without names,” which has long seemed to offer a paradigm for other cultural cross sections such as the history of literary form. The attractiveness of such models lies of course in the way in which they are able to work with the history and evolution of such relatively objective phenomena as artistic techniques and the raw materials of the visual arts. Media, theories of perspective, the relationship between line and color, iconography: such topics mark out a kind of lost innocence of purely formal content for which the literary critic, faced with the more ambiguous phenomena of linguistic significance and of forms in time, yearns in vain. The methodological limits of such models are equally symptomatic, for they stem in large part from those problems of “punctuation” evoked above. For what is it in the long run that is so profoundly problematical about the concept of the Baroque or of Mannerism (not to speak of the infinitely more elastic notion of the modern itself), if not the effort to locate real beginnings and endings in what can never be seized as anything but a continuity? — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 662

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior interest in the New Critics’ ahistorical self-image and to Jameson’s own dialectic of periodization — also resonates with Lukács’s totality-inflected sense of historical periods. — connects to: Totalizing cultural analogy cannot account for genuine historical change — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 664; Cultural paradigms replace previous aesthetics entirely when they shift — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 382; No coherent universal history of art remains possible — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 248 (+7 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘punctuation’ problem — that cultural history cannot locate real beginnings and endings in a continuity — is a genuinely dense, paradigm-level insight about the limits of all period-based historical models.

Broader Connections

• Totalizing cultural analogy cannot account for genuine historical change #corroborates (0.90) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 664
• Cultural stasis is constant novelty without ordered sequential change #corroborates (0.82) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 18
• No coherent universal history of art remains possible #corroborates (0.80) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 248
• Intellectual change proceeds through uneven breaks rather than tradition or rupture #corroborates (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 180
• Cultures represent themselves as fixed but are always changed by history #corroborates (0.75)
• Cultural paradigms replace previous aesthetics entirely when they shift #corroborates (0.72) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 382