Postmodernism is a reflex of capitalism’s modification, not a new social order.

Evidence

Despite the delirium of some of its celebrants and apologists (whose euphoria, however, is an interesting historical symptom in its own right), a truly new culture could only emerge through the collective struggle to create a new social system. The constitutive impurity of all Postmodernism theory, then (like capital itself, it must be at internal distance from itself, must include the foreign body of alien content), confirms the insight of a periodization that must be insisted on over and over again, namely, that Postmodernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order (the rumor about which, under the name of “postindustrial society,” ran through the media a few years ago), but only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 13

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the crux definition of ‘cultural dominant’ as the reader needs it — postmodernism as periodization within capitalism, not an adoptable style.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing — style is periodizable because it is economically determined — is the load-bearing claim of the whole book and its hardest to falsify.
• XREF: connects to: So-called postmodern trends merely continue capitalist processes begun under modernism — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 574; Toynbee introduced ‘post-modern’ as an epochal category, not an aesthetic one. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 12; Postmodernism is best treated as a historical condition, not an ideas set. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 32 (+4 more)