Genres escaped literature and now typologize reality itself

Evidence

The dissonance and incompatibility in fact have “literary” analogies, which it is very strange to rediscover here, in the area of social and historical reality itself. Indeed, this peculiar mismatch reminds one of nothing quite so much as of generic discordance, as when a writer or an orator misguidedly incorporates a text of an incompatible type or lapses into a different register of discourse. In literature, of course, the disappearance of genres as such, along with their conventions and the distinct reading rules they project, is a familiar story. It would now seem that, far from becoming extinct, the older genres, released like viruses from their traditional ecosystem, have now spread out and colonized reality itself, which we divide up and file away according to typological schemes which are no longer those of subject matter but for which the alternative topic of style seems somehow inadequate. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 792

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how aesthetic form periodizes — here genres jump out of literature into the organization of reality itself. — connects to: Controlled collective clichés are poorer than living reality
• SEED: An essay angle: the encyclopedia or database as genre — how tech platforms file reality under style-based typologies that don’t match subject matter.