Postmodern theory holds that no one escapes culture’s ideological constructions

Evidence

In postmodern analyses of popular culture, this narrative of critique followed by, or engendering, recuperation has taken on an entirely different valence. Mockery, sarcasm, and attack have come to be considered at once elitist and naive, as has any self-positioning (at least potentially) apart from that ”average human being, fallible but likeable”—self-positioning outside the power of dominant culture and its ideologies. In postmodernity, none of us, however analytically sharp, escapes culture and its constructions; there is no outside, no Archimedean lever, no utopian space beyond ideology. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 228

Categorization

• DEFINE: Crisply defines the core postmodern claim of no-position-outside.
• XREF: connects to: Barthes held that proletarian culture never exists, only bourgeois ideology — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 231; The particular marked body replaces the abstract universal subject in postmodernity — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 549; Postmodern realism yields only ideological images, never unmediated reality (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism theory cannot produce a stable inside-outside position for its own observers #expands (0.80)
• Postmodernism theory itself exemplifies the allegorical structures it describes #exemplifies (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 392
• Postmodern realism yields only ideological images, never unmediated reality #qualifies (0.72)
• Postmodernism abandons ideology critique for cynical reason #qualifies (0.72) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 21