Commodified modernism collapses the distinction between real and imaginary negation.

Evidence

Postmodernism, I think, went on to abolish something even more fundamental, namely, the distinction between the inside and the outside (all the modernists ever said about that was that the one ought to express the other, which suggests that no one had yet begun to doubt whether you needed to have either of them at all in the first place). The former streets then become so many aisles in a department store, which, if you think about it in Japanese fashion, becomes the model and the emblem, the secret inner structure and the concept, of the postmodern “city,” already, appropriately enough, realized in certain sections of Tokyo. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 259 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Alongside the lovelessness of the fictions, the repeated intrusions of a misogynistic streak, and a certain spontaneous belief in the universality of betrayal – which Orwell too had begun displaying since his earliest writings, from Burmese Days onwards – Rushdie has also deployed that same stance of unbelonging, of the lone individual occupying a moral high ground above the chimeras of politics’ (Rushdie’s phrase), delivering his denunciations of Left and Right alike: Indira Gandhi, the Pakistani Generals, the Communist Parties, the Naxalites, film stars, prophets, the short-lived banning of La Prensa. On certain issues – racism, religiosity, dictatorship, empire, and the like – one could take a position, and one could also, in a general way, speak of oneself as a man of the Left, as Orwell himself frequently did; but there was no actual Left, no existing community of praxis, within that world which had given one’s imagination and fictions their energy, with which one felt in any fundamental way bonded, accepting and struggling with the risks and the restrictions and the suffering that such bonding often implies. From all such groundings one had ‘floated upwards’, even as one constantly thrashed about denouncing all, undifferentiatedly, that one had left behind. In an earlier time, right into the heart of modernism, such desolations of the self were still experienced quite frequently as a loss; what postmodernism has done is to validate precisely the pleasures of such unbelonging, which is rehearsed now as a utopia, so that belonging nowhere is nevertheless construed as the perennial pleasure of belonging everywhere. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 271 (#expands, via linked claim)

Where postmodernism revels in mediation—intertextuality, irony, the meta—immediacy negates mediation to effect flow and indistinction. Where postmodernism aesthetically activates pastiche, a “blank,” playful “heterogeneity without a norm,” immediacy precipitates blur, a demediated meld that lacks the contours to array heterogeneity. Where postmodernism aesthetically and epistemically embraces the surface and eschews depth, immediacy mires itself in profundities of corporeality, affect, and polarized extremity. Where postmodern affect undergoes “waning”—a dilution of modernist ferocity like anomie and alienation into “free-floating” flatness—immediacy’s affects wax rapt and veritable. Where postmodernism inscribes “a crisis of historicity,” immediacy encodes a crisis of futurity, a beclouded nonhorizon. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 32 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postmodernism abolishes the inside-outside distinction that modernism still presupposed — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 259; Modernism doubted Being’s stability while postmodernism abandoned Being altogether — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 473; Postmodernism transformed the modernist experience of self-loss into a celebrated utopia of unbelonging — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 271 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism abolishes the inside-outside distinction that modernism still presupposed #complicates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 259
• Postmodernism transformed the modernist experience of self-loss into a celebrated utopia of unbelonging #expands (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 271
• Modernism doubted Being’s stability while postmodernism abandoned Being altogether #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 473
• Immediacy negates mediation, blur, and depth where postmodernism embraced them. #qualifies (0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 32