Postmodernism as lifestyle expresses the consciousness of a new class fraction, the yuppies

Evidence

Indeed, although concrete social agents seem to make their appearance with Featherstone’s proposals (postmodernists are then those artists or musicians, those gallery or museum officials or record company executives, those specific bourgeois or youth or working-class consumers), here too the requirement of differentiating levels of abstraction must be maintained. For one can also plausibly assert that “Postmodernism” in the more limited sense of an ethos and a “lifestyle” (truly a contemptible expression, that) is the expression of the “consciousness” of a whole new class fraction that largely transcends the limits of the groups enumerated above. This larger and more abstract category has variously been labeled as a new petit bourgeoisie, a professional-managerial class, or more succinctly as “the yuppies” (each of these expressions smuggling in a little surplus of concrete social representation along with itself). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 869

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes a narrow enumeration of postmodernists (artists, officials, consumers) from the broader class-fraction reading (yuppies as new petit bourgeoisie / PMC).
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own cognitive mapping exercise — Jameson is mapping a class position in the world system. — connects to: Postmodernism’s acceptance stems from 1968ers’ class position and disillusionment — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 617