Postmodern cultures lack a stylistic norm that modernist deviation presupposed

Evidence

Yet in the dialectical leap from quantity to quality, the explosion of modern literature into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms has been followed by a linguistic fragmentation of social life itself to the point where the norm itself is eclipsed: reduced to a neutral and reified media speech (far enough from the Utopian aspirations of the inventors of Esperanto or Basic English), which itself then becomes but one more idiolect among many. Modernist styles thereby become postmodernist codes. And that the stupendous proliferation of social codes today into professional and disciplinary jargons (but also into the badges of affirmation of ethnic, gender, race, religious, and class-factional adhesion) is also a political phenomenon, the problem of micropolitics sufficiently demonstrates. If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 76

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the mechanism behind the pivotal shift: a society-wide norm (‘media speech’) gets eclipsed and reduced to one idiolect among many, which is exactly what the reader needs to define pastiche and periodize style.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that hegemonic speech has vanished while economic constraint persists — ‘faceless masters continue to inflect… but no longer need to impose their speech’ — is the paradigm-shifting core of the whole waning-of-affect/periodization thesis.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated goal of mapping their own position in the world system: ‘field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm’ is the standing injunction to situate oneself. — connects to: avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 564; Eclecticism of contemporary culture signals a general slackening of taste — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 486