Modernist and postmodern religious revivals are not genuine returns to tradition.

Evidence

For I take it as axiomatic that what is now called fundamentalism is also a postmodern phenomenon, whatever it would like to think it thinks about a purer and more authentic past. The Iranian revolution, which became Islamic and clerical, was certainly launched against the Shah as an agent of modernization — in this, it was as anti-modern as it is postmodern in its insistence on all the basic features of a modern industrialized and bureaucratic state. But the paradox of Freudian repetition would seem to hold inversely for traditionalism as a postmodern (or even a modern) program — just as with the one you cannot really have any “first” time, with the other one you cannot imagine any restoration that can really be considered traditional or authentic. Modernist restorations seem to have produced a modernist form of tradition that was more accurately filed under the varieties of the different fascisms; the postmodern sorts all seem to have much in common with what the Left calls “new social movements”; indeed, they constitute various forms and varieties of those, and not all are reactionary — witness liberation theology. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 830

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the earlier discussion of the ‘waning of affect’ and the impossibility of an originary ‘first time’ in postmodern repetition — connects to Jean Baudrillard on simulacra and to Hobsbawm & Ranger’s ‘invented traditions’. — connects to: Attempted revivals of past traditions accelerate their decay — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1454
• DEFINE: Clarifies how Jameson extends his cultural-dominant thesis to religion: fundamentalism is categorized not by its self-image but by its systemic position.