Debates over postmodernism are fundamentally political judgments about capitalism.

Evidence

The problem of Postmodernism - how its fundamental characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary, a mystification — this problem is at one and the same time an aesthetic and a political one. The various positions that can logically be taken on it, whatever terms they are couched in, can always be shown to articulate visions of history in which the evaluation of the social moment in which we live today is the object of an essentially political affirmation or repudiation. Indeed, the very enabling premise of the debate turns on an initial, strategic presupposition about our social system: to grant some historic originality to a postmodernist culture is also implicitly to affirm some radical structural difference between what is sometimes called consumer society and earlier moments of the capitalism from which it emerged. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 174

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up Jameson’s central frame: positions on postmodernism are really affirmations or repudiations of the current social order.
• XREF: Links to the reader’s stated goal of mapping their own position in the world system — the ‘strategic presupposition about our social system’ is the lever. — connects to: Postmodernism holds that truth claims are really bids for political power — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 248