Postmodern theory turns every observation about the present into evidence of itself.

Evidence

But this unforeseeable return of narrative as the narrative of the end of narratives, this return of history in the midst of the prognosis of the demise of historical telos, suggests a second feature of Postmodernism theory which requires attention, namely, the way in which virtually any observation about the present can be mobilized in the very search for the present itself and pressed into service as a symptom and an index of the deeper logic of the postmodern, which imperceptibly turns into its own theory and the theory of itself. How could it be otherwise where there no longer exists any such “deeper logic” for the surface to manifest and where the symptom has become its own disease (and vice versa, no doubt)? But the frenzy whereby virtually anything in the present is appealed to for testimony as to the latter’s uniqueness and radical difference from earlier moments of human time does indeed strike one sometimes as harboring a pathology distinctively autoreferential, as though our utter forgetfulness of the past exhausted itself in the vacant but mesmerized contemplation of a schizophrenic present that is incomparable virtually by definition. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 14

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is the falsifiability worry head-on: if any observation can be mobilized as a symptom of the postmodern, the theory risks being unfalsifiable in the exact sense the reader wants to test.
• XREF: connects to: Postmodern abstractions that claim universality are actually local and self-inverting. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 850; Postmodernism theory itself exemplifies the allegorical structures it describes — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 392; Postmodernism’s presentism forecloses the historical understanding needed to explain it — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 725
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Postmodern abstractions that claim universality are actually local and self-inverting. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 850; Postmodernism theory itself exemplifies the allegorical structures it describes — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 392; Postmodernism’s presentism forecloses the historical understanding needed to explain it — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 725

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism’s presentism forecloses the historical understanding needed to explain it #complicates (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 725