Nominalism operates as a social-existential force in postmodern culture

Evidence

What is now wanted is some larger social and cultural diagnosis of the nominalist imperative in contemporary times: the tendency toward immanence, the flight from transcendence characterized in our opening section, in this light becomes a private or negative phenomenon, whose positive side is only disclosed by the hypothesis of “nominalism” as a social and existential force in its own right (postmodern politics and the postmodern inflection of the older concept of “democracy” can also be interpreted in this way, as a growing feeling that the reality of social particulars and individuals is somehow inconsistent with older ways of thinking of society and the social, including the ideology of “individualism” itself). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 549

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘waning of affect’ and flight from transcendence themes — the reader’s own cognitive map of their position depends on this social diagnosis of nominalism. — connects to: Formalist language, emptied of content, gives rise to nominalism as bourgeois thought — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 66; Plurality and indeterminacy beliefs long predate the postmodern era — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 69; the MOC “The Forge and the Other: How Power, Discourse, and Encounter Cast the Self” (+1 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘nominalism as social force’ explains the contemporary distrust of all general categories — from the critique of ‘grand narratives’ to identity politics rejecting ‘individualism’ itself.