High modernism’s subversive power is situation-specific and ungeneralizable across nations.

Evidence

We need to take into account the possibility that the national situation in which Habermas thinks and writes is rather different from our own: McCarthyism and repression are, for one thing, realities in the Federal Republic of Germany today, and the intellectual intimidation of the Left and the silencing of a left culture (largely associated, by the West German Right, with “terrorism”) has been on the whole a far more successful operation than elsewhere in the West. The triumph of a new McCarthyism and of the culture of the Spiessburger and the philistine suggests the possibility that in this particular national situation Habermas may well be right, and the older forms of high modernism may still retain something of the subversive power they have lost elsewhere. In that case, a Postmodernism which seeks to enfeeble and undermine that power may well also merit his ideological diagnosis in a local way, even though the assessment remains ungeneralizable. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 184

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the political value of an aesthetic form is nationally contingent — not intrinsic — bears directly on the falsifiability test of the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis and on the reader’s own position-map.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the reader’s cognitive-map project: aesthetic-political value is situated, not universal, echoing the situatedness questions raised in the essays.