Postmodernism emerges only once modernization is complete and nature is gone

Evidence

Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which “culture” has become a veritable “second nature.” Indeed, what happened to culture may well be one of the more important clues for tracking the postmodern: an immense dilation of its sphere (the sphere of commodities), an immense and historically original acculturation of the Real, a quantum leap in what Benjamin still called the “aestheticization” of reality (he thought it meant fascism, but we know it’s only fun: a prodigious exhilaration with the new order of things, a commodity rush, our “representations” of things tending to arouse an enthusiasm and a mood swing not necessarily inspired by the things themselves). So, in postmodern culture, “culture” has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself: modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself. Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 8

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines postmodernism’s condition: nature gone, culture become ‘second nature’ and itself a commodity.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated key idea that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing; also to Benjamin’s aestheticization-of-politics thesis. — connects to: Postmodernism arises when its defining adversary, bourgeois morality, vanishes — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 226
• QUESTION: Is ‘nature gone for good’ a falsifiable claim, or a retrospective narrative frame? Push on testability.