Postmodern society has eliminated the old types of solitude for rich and poor alike

Evidence

The process is, however, more visible, and more easily grasped as an objective historical tendency, when it is seen to affect rich and poor alike, indifferently, and on both sides of the political spectrum. And this is in turn more easily demonstrated by registering the disappearance, from postmodern society, of the older kinds of solitude: not only the pathetic misfits and victims of anomie (abundantly collected and catalogued from naturalism to Sherwood Anderson) no longer present in the nooks and crannies of a then more natural and capacious social order, but the solitary rebels and existential antiheroes who used to allow the “liberal imagination” to strike a blow at the “system” have also vanished, along with existentialism itself, and their former embodiments have become the “leaders” of various groupuscules. No current media topic illustrates this better than the “bag people” (also known, in media euphemism, as the “homeless”). No longer solitary freaks and eccentrics, they area henceforth recognized and accredited sociological category, the object of the scrutiny and concern of the appropriate experts, and clearly potentially organizable when they are not in fact already organized in good postmodern fashion. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 698

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier discussion in this volume of the waning of affect and the end of the existential subject; also to Jameson’s broader claim about the death of the individual on which postmodernism’s cultural dominant rests. — connects to: The society of abundance has lost all experience of the negative — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 218; Every part of life was once sheltered from advertising and commerce — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 13