Mode-of-production thinking arises where rapid economic change makes backward areas visibly contrastable

Evidence

My own feeling is that thinking of the type we are considering, which lays primary emphasis on the development of economic techniques and socio-economic relationships, is likely to be a function, first, of the rapidity of contemporary economic advance, and, second, of the facility with which a contrast can be observed between areas which are economically advancing and areas which are still in “lower” stages of development. In the 1750s and 60s, in cities like Glasgow and in areas such as the more advanced provinces in the north of France, the whole social life of the communities concerned was being rapidly and visibly transformed, and it was fairly obvious that this was happening as a result of profound changes taking place in economic techniques and basic socio-economic relationships. And the new forms of economic organisation which were emerging could be fairly easily compared and contrasted with the older forms of organisation which still existed, say, in the Scottish Highlands, or in the remainder of France -or among the Indian tribes in America. If changes in the mode of subexistence were playing such an important and “progressive” role in the development of contemporary society, it seemed a fair bet that they must also have done so in that of past society. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 863

Categorization

• XREF: This is the mechanism behind Jameson’s claim that the concept of totality has historical preconditions — directly grinds on the reader’s question of whether the postmodernist ‘cultural dominant’ thesis is falsifiable (it depends on a particular observational standpoint).
• SHARE: Send to anyone who works on Scottish Enlightenment intellectual history or the sociology of knowledge — the Glasgow/Highlands contrast as the empirical ground of stage theory.