Postmodern manifestos secretly still depend on the modernist tropes they reject

Evidence

It is not clear, to put it crudely and succinctly, why, in an environment of sheer advertising simulacra and images, we should even want to sharpen and renew our perception of those things. Can some other function, then, be conceived for culture in our time? The question at least offers a standard by which to evaluate the claims of contemporary Postmodernism to some genuine formal and spatial originality: it can at least do so negatively by starkly disclosing the remnants of an unacceptable modernism still at work in the various postmodern manifestos: the concept of irony in Venturi, for example, just as fully as that of defamiliarization seen in the book by MacraeGibson. Such older modernist themes are appealed to in extremis when the newer theories require some ultimate conceptual grounding they cannot generate out of their own internal economies (and this not least because the very logic of postmodern theory is inconsistent with and hostile to grounding in the first place, sometimes also stigmatized as essentialism or foundationalism). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 312

Categorization

• QUESTION: If postmodern theory is ‘hostile to grounding,’ then arguably no empirical test could settle the cultural-dominant claim — worth chasing for the falsifiability project.
• XREF: connects to: Modernist parody persists in Eliot and Joyce, so parody cannot distinguish Postmodernism — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 115; Jencks’ ‘double-coding’ criterion fails because montage already defines Modernism — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 81; The postmodern aesthetic of hybridity rendered the manifesto obsolete — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 239