Jameson captured ‘postmodernism’ for the Left via discursive struggle

Evidence

With these parameters in place, a coherent account of postmodernity had arrived. Henceforward, one great vision commands the field, setting the terms of theoretical opposition in the most striking imaginable way. It is a normal fate of strategic concepts to be subject to unexpected political capture and reversal, in the course of discursive struggle over their meaning. Characteristically, in this century, the outcome have been détournements to the Right — ‘civilization’, say, once a proud banner of progressive Enlightenment thought, becoming a stigma of decadence at the hands of German conservatism; ‘civil society’, a term of critique for classical Marxism, now a cynosure in the idiom of contemporary liberalism. In the dominion over the term postmodernism won by Jameson, we witness the opposite achievement: a concept whose visionary origins were all but completely effaced in usages complicit with the established order, wrested away by a prodigious display of theoretical intelligence and energy for the cause of a revolutionary Left. This has been a discursive victory gained against all the political odds, in a period of neo-liberal hegemony when every familiar landmark of the Left appeared to sink beneath the waves of a tidal reaction. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 171

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘political capture’ of strategic concepts (‘civilization’, ‘civil society’) parallels the trajectory of terms like ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ — and contextualizes the concept’s eventual right-ward re-appropriation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a single theorist, against all structural odds, seized a concept discursively for the Left during neo-liberal hegemony is a dense insight into how intellectual prestige operates — well beyond a simple historical summary.