Postmodernism erases the high culture versus mass culture boundary.

Evidence

Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the Postmodernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The Postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply “quote,” as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 38

Categorization

• DEFINE: The key distinguishing feature of postmodernism: not merely quoting mass culture like modernists Joyce/Mahler, but incorporating its degraded forms into the very substance of the work — this is the groundwork for the parody/pastiche distinction.
• XREF: Connects directly to Adorno and the Frankfurt School’s denunciation of the culture industry, and to the reader’s interest in how this boundary collapse relates to modern examples. — connects to: High and mass culture interpenetration predates postmodernism by decades — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 570; Expansion of capital and demography dilutes inherited culture into a lower postmodern level. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 165; Postmodernism’s high-low cultural fusion is populist, unlike avant-garde transgression. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 166 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Does this boundary-effacement offer a falsifiable test for postmodernism, or is it too broad given that many modernists also drew on popular forms?