Modernism’s enemy shifted from fallen social life to rival sign systems

Evidence

My sense is that in recent years, although the general binary scaffolding of the modernist aesthetic remains intact in many otherwise seemingly more advanced theories, the content of this negative term becomes modified in what then become historically interesting and symptomatic ways: in particular, from a general characterization of social life or consciousness, the negative term now comes to be reconstituted as a specific sign system. Thus it is no longer fallen social life generally which is opposed to the brutal freshness of the aesthetic renewal of perception but, as it were, two types of perception, two kinds of sign systems, which are now in opposition. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 313

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key shift Jameson charts: the aesthetic opposition is no longer art-vs-habituated-life but one sign system against another.