Postmodern fragments function as narratives detached from any single referent

Evidence

The generic cultural consumption projected by these fragments is more dynamic and demands some association with narrative (itself now grasped in the wider sense of a type of textual consumption). In that sense, the scientific experiments are narratives fully as much as Lawrence of Arabia; the vision of white-collar workers and bureaucrats mounting flights of escalators is no less a narrative vision than the science fiction film clips (or horror music); even the still photograph of sheet lightning suggests a multiple set of narrative frames (Ansel Adams, or the terror of the great storm, or the “logo” of the Remington-type western landscape, or the eighteenthcentury sublime, or the answer of God to the rainmaking ceremony, or the beginning of the end of the world). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 233

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson stretches ‘narrative’ into a mode of textual consumption to capture how postmodern fragments propose multiple competing story frames at once.
• XREF: connects to: Postmodern art severs images from meaning into random nonrelational fragments — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 67; Additive data without narrative structure produces meaninglessness akin to Dadaism — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 133