Dominant cultural paradigms need not come from a society’s ruling agents

Evidence

This identification of the class content of postmodern culture does not at all imply that yuppies have become something like a new ruling class, merely that their cultural practices and values, their local ideologies, have articulated a useful dominant ideological and cultural paradigm for this stage of capital. It is indeed often the case that cultural forms prevalent in a particular period are not furnished by the principal agents of the social formation in question (businessmen who no doubt have something better to do with their time or are driven by psychological and ideological motive forces of a different type). What is essential is that the culture ideology in question articulate the world in the most useful way functionally, or in ways that can be functionally reappropriated. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 870

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s falsifiability test of the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis — Jameson specifies the functional-reappropriation criterion that makes the claim testable. — connects to: A ruling class lacking organic intellectuals cannot sustain hegemony — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1869