Postmodern objects resist restoration to any prior lived context.

Evidence

Here, however, we have a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dance hall. There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or glamour magazines. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 54

Categorization

• DEFINE: Directly explicates what Jameson means by the failure of the hermeneutic gesture in postmodernism.
• XREF: connects to: Things resist all relational designations humanity tries to impose on them.; External objects resist the For-itself’s projects by a measurable degree