Even identical aesthetic features differ in meaning across economic epochs.

Evidence

The first point to be made about the conception of periodization in dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of Postmodernism were identical with and coterminous to those of an older modernism — a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel — the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function, owing to the very different positioning of Postmodernism in the economic system of late capital and, beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 45

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharp definition of ‘periodization in dominance’ — culture’s meaning is set by its economic positioning, not its formal features.
• QUESTION: This is the crux for pushing falsifiability: if meaning is fixed by epochal position rather than features, can the dominance thesis ever be disproved by counterexamples?
• XREF: Feeds directly into the reader’s core question about style being periodizable — aesthetic form as the economy’s way of appearing. — connects to: The grey, disenchanted look of the world stems from its commodity character.; Shared-dreaming fiction encodes its era’s political economy, collective versus commercial. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 521