Postmodern culture’s vector is a new professional stratum between multinational capital and weakened classes.

Evidence

Late capitalism remained a class society, but no class within it was quite the same as before. The immediate vector of postmodern culture was certainly to be found in the stratum of newly affluent employees and professionals created by the rapid growth of the service and speculative sectors of the developed capitalist societies. Above this brittle yuppie layer loomed the massive structures of multinational corporations themselves — vast servo-mechanisms of production and power, whose operations criss-cross the global economy, and determine its representations in the collective imaginary. Below, as an older industrial order is churned up, traditional class formations have weakened, while segmented identities and localized groups, typically based on ethnic or sexual differences, multiply. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 164

Categorization

• XREF: This social-base analysis of postmodernism connects to Jameson’s fullest political frame and to the reader’s wider debate about postmodernism’s class grounding. — connects to: Postmodernism is a cultural dominant allowing coexisting subordinate features, not a uniform style. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 41; Postmodernism’s breadth as a term lets it mediate between economic and cultural life. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 16; The modern-to-postmodern shift correlates with capitalism’s transformation from monopoly to multinational — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 374

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism’s breadth as a term lets it mediate between economic and cultural life. #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 16
• Postmodernism is a cultural dominant allowing coexisting subordinate features, not a uniform style. #qualifies (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 41
• The modern-to-postmodern shift correlates with capitalism’s transformation from monopoly to multinational #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 374