Postmodernism arises when its defining adversary, bourgeois morality, vanishes

Evidence

For what this landscape means is that two conditions of modernism have vanished utterly. There is no longer any vestige of an academicist establishment against which an advanced art could pit itself. Historically, the conventions of academic art were always closely tied, not only to the self-representations of titled or upper classes, but also to the sensibility and pretensions of traditional middle classes below them. With the passing of the bourgeois world, this aesthetic foil is missing. The title and site of the most deliberately lurid brat-pack show in Britain says everything: Sensation — care of the Royal Academy. Similarly, modernism tapped violent energies of revolt against the official morality of the time — standards of repression and hypocrisy notoriously stigmatized, with reason, as specifically bourgeois. The jettisoning of any real pretence of upholding these standards, widely visible from the eighties onwards, could not but affect the situation of oppositional art: once bourgeois morality in the traditional sense is over, it is as if an amplifier is suddenly cut off. Modernism, from its earliest origins in Baudelaire or Flaubert onwards, virtually defined itself as ‘anti-bourgeois’. Postmodernism is what occurs when, without any victory, that adversary is gone. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 226

Categorization

• DEFINE: Tightly defines postmodernism as a negation that has lost its pole — ‘what occurs when, without any victory, that adversary is gone.’
• DEEPTHINKING: The reversal — postmodernism as what happens when the enemy is gone without any victory — is a paradigm-shifting framing that compresses Jameson’s whole periodization argument into a single counterintuitive sentence.
• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s own writings on postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, and to the broader debate the reader is entering. — connects to: Postmodernism’s self-definition depends on an inadequate account of what it opposes. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 134; Postmodernism emerges only once modernization is complete and nature is gone — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 8; Bourgeois libertinism spread downward undermines working-class moral discipline

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism emerges only once modernization is complete and nature is gone #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 8
• Bourgeois libertinism spread downward undermines working-class moral discipline #exemplifies (0.72)