Postmodern wrapping preserves hierarchy but makes it reversible, unlike intertextuality

Evidence

I will therefore borrow the architects’ own term and call this second procedure wrapping, it being understood that we are doing something similar here, and that it would therefore be well to try to “produce its concept” on a theoretical level also. Wrapping can be seen as a reaction to the disintegration of that more traditional concept Hegel called “ground,” which passed into humanistic thought in the form named “context,” felt by its opponents to be basely “external” or “extrinsic,” since it seemed to imply the double standard of two radically distinct sets of thoughts and procedures (one for the text, the other — generally imported from the outside, from history or sociology manuals — for the context in question), and, in addition, to be always redolent of some larger and even more intolerable conception of the social totality to come. The problem then seemed to reorganize itself into a formal one: what kind of relationships are we now to establish between these two distinct sets of data or raw materials if the figure/ground relationship is excluded from the outset? “Intertextuality” was always an exceedingly weak and formalistic solution to this problem, which wrapping solves much better, being first of all more frivolous (and thereby instantly disposable), but also, and above all, because, unlike intertextuality, it retains the essential prerequisite of priority or even hierarchy — the functional subordination of one element to another (sometimes also even called “causality”) — but makes that now reversible. What is Andrey Tarkovsky, from Nostalgia, “The Russian house inside the Italian cathedral” wrapped can also be used as the wrapper; the wrapper can also be wrapped in its turn. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 266

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson’s key term ‘wrapping’ — defined against ‘ground/context’ and ‘intertextuality’ as the postmodern relationship of text to its framing material.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of distinguishing parody vs pastiche — wrapping is a structural sibling to pastiche, a ‘frivolous’ retention of hierarchy with reversed valuation.