Postmodern texts relate through difference rather than organic unity

Evidence

I would like to characterize the postmodernist experience of form with what will seem, I hope, a paradoxical slogan: namely, the proposition that “difference relates.” Our own recent criticism, from Macherey on, has been concerned to stress the heterogeneity and profound discontinuities of the work of art, no longer unified or organic, but now a virtual grab bag or lumber room of disjoined subsystems and random raw materials and impulses of all kinds. … Theories of difference, however, have tended to stress disjunction to the point at which the materials of the text, including its words and sentences, tend to fall apart into random and inert passivity, into a set of elements which entertain separations from one another. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 120

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the postmodernist shift from unified artwork to disjoined ‘text’ read by differentiation, a core concept for the reader’s parody/pastiche distinction.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what positive account makes ‘difference relate’ rather than merely fall into inert fragmentation?
• XREF: connects to: Postmodern science fiction implodes inward to revitalize fragments of simulation — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 406; Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 65; Collage and montage serve as the primary form of postmodern discourse. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 346 (+2 more)