Postmodernism replaces the autonomous work with the decentered text

Evidence

It is, of course, no accident that today, in full Postmodernism, the older language of the “work” — the work of art, the masterwork — has everywhere largely been displaced by the rather different language of the “text,” of texts and textuality — a language from which the achievement of organic or monumental form is strategically excluded. Everything can now be a text in that sense (daily life, the body, political representations), while objects that were formerly “works” can now be reread as immense ensembles or systems of texts of various kinds, superimposed on each other by way of the various intertextualities, successions of fragments, or, yet again, sheer process (henceforth called textual production or textualization). The autonomous work of art thereby — along with the old autonomous subject or ego — seems to have vanished, to have been volatilized. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 224

Categorization

• DEFINE: Essential for distinguishing postmodern textuality (fragment, intertextuality, process) against modernist work/monumental form — core to the parody/pastiche distinction.
• XREF: Connects to Barthes’s ‘Death of the Author’ and Derridean textuality, and to the postmodern ‘waning of affect’ tied to dissolution of the autonomous ego. — connects to: Postmodern science fiction implodes inward to revitalize fragments of simulation — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 406; Postmodern affirmation of fragmentation depends on abandoning autonomy ideals — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 785; The particular marked body replaces the abstract universal subject in postmodernity — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 549