Jameson rejects the poststructuralist claim that the centered subject never existed

Evidence

(Of the two possible formulations of this notion — the historicist one, that a once-existing centered subject, in the period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organizational bureaucracy dissolved; and the more radical poststructuralist position, for which such a subject never existed in the first place but constituted something like an ideological mirage — I obviously incline toward the former; the latter must in any case take into account something like a “reality of the appearance.”) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 69

Categorization

• XREF: His ‘reality of the appearance’ hedge connects to the falsifiability question the reader wants to push on — the historicist claim is testable while the mirage claim is not.