Periodizing postmodernism as a unified system may betray its own logic of difference

Evidence

If what is historically unique about the postmodern is thus acknowledged as sheer heteronomy and the emergence of random and unrelated subsystems of all kinds, then, or so the argument runs, there has to be something perverse about the effort to grasp it as a unified system in the first place. The effort at conceptual unification is, to say the least, strikingly inconsistent with the spirit of Postmodernism itself; perhaps, indeed, ought it not to be unmasked as an attempt to “master” or “dominate” the postmodern, to reduce and exclude its play of differences, and even to enforce some new conceptual conformity over its pluralistic subjects? — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 739

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is the crux of the reader’s falsifiability test on the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis: if the field’s own emerging account says it is sheer heteronomy, is any totalizing abstraction about it illegitimate by its own terms?
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s suspicion that ‘cultural dominant’ may be unfalsifiable — an unfalsifiable totalization claiming to describe a field whose own content denies totalization. — connects to: Defining Postmodernism as internal to Modernism abandons its periodizing claim; Plurality and indeterminacy beliefs long predate the postmodern era — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 69; Postmodernism discourse must be dated to its specific historical conjuncture — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 597 (+4 more)