Postmodern villains occupy the structural role of the squares without any social content

Evidence

Yet if there are no longer any “middle classes” to be found in the heartland, there is something else that may serve as something for a substitute for them, at least in the dynamic of narrative structure itself: for what we find at Lulu’s class reunion (besides Ray and her own past) is Charley’s business colleague, that is to say, a yuppie bureaucrat, along with his pregnant wife. These are unquestionably the baleful parents we sought, but of some distant and not quite imaginable future, not of the older, traditional American past: they occupy the semic slot of the “squares,” but without any social basis or content any longer (they can scarcely be read as embodiments of the Protestant ethic, for example, or of puritanism or white racism or patriarchy). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 640

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in periodization — the ‘squares’ as emptied structural slot shows how aesthetic categories retain form while losing their original social referent. — connects to: Greimasian semiotic squares generate narrative characters from logical combinations of semes — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3984