People’s lived sense of their era may be wholly unrelated to its structural reality

Evidence

But this is a speculation which presupposes the possibility that at an outer limit, the sense people have of themselves and their own moment of history may ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with its reality: that the existential may be absolutely distinct, as some ultimate “false consciousness,” from the structural and social significance of a collective phenomenon, surely a possibility rendered more plausible by the fact of global imperialism, in terms of which the meaning of a given nation-state — for everyone else on the globe — may be wildly at odds from their own inner experiences and their own interior daily life. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 615

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the radical falsifiability core of the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis: if lived self-image can be pure false consciousness, periodization’s totalizing claims are non-falsifiable by any experiential evidence.
• XREF: Connects to reader’s push on whether ‘cultural dominant’ thesis is falsifiable — the whole chapter is structured around this tension between existential and structural scales. — connects to: Knowing a historical transition differs vitally from living through it — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 104; Historic transformations are set in motion by people unaware of them — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 306; Nostalgic heritage claims cannot sustain youth identity against present stigma — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 465