Poststructuralism’s assault on historical thinking does not vindicate synchronic thought, which is self-contradictory.

Evidence

One’s occasional feeling that, for poststructuralism, all enemies are on the left, and that the principal target always turns out to be this or that form of historical thinking, could conceivably lead to something other than impatience and exasperation if we drew a rather different kind of consequence. … Synchronic thought is not particularly vindicated by the deficiencies of the diachronic; indeed, it remains peculiarly contradictory and incoherent (the demonstration of this is often referred to as the “critique of structuralism”), with this difference: unlike the diachronic, the conceptual antinomies of the synchronic are at once obvious and unavoidable; synchronic “thought” is a contradiction in terms, it cannot even pass itself off as thinking, and with it the last traditional vocation of classical philosophy vanishes. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 484

Categorization

• QUESTION: Jameson argues synchronic thought is ‘a contradiction in terms’ — worth chasing how this bears on whether his own cultural-dominant thesis is itself a synchronic claim he’d have to reject.
• XREF: connects to: Postmodernism is best treated as a historical condition, not an ideas set. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 32; The purported postcrisis consensus was ideologically incoherent and self-contradictory — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 537; Internal criticism of tradition does not prove rejection of that tradition (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Postmodernism is best treated as a historical condition, not an ideas set. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 32; The purported postcrisis consensus was ideologically incoherent and self-contradictory — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 537; Internal criticism of tradition does not prove rejection of that tradition (+3 more)