Culture’s dissolution means total expansion, not its disappearance

Evidence

Yet to argue that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in precapitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life — from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself — can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorized sense. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 157

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key non-disappearance thesis: culture exploding outward rather than vanishing — core to the ‘cultural dominant’ claim.
• XREF: Connects to Debord’s society of the spectacle and Baudrillard’s simulacrum, the writer’s own image-of-the-simulacrum thread. — connects to: Expansion of capital and demography dilutes inherited culture into a lower postmodern level. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 165; Cultural breaks are growing rarer, smaller, and possibly terminal. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1233
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘everything has become cultural’ as an unfalsifiable claim — how would anyone test or refute total cultural saturation?