Stylistic features change meaning when they shift from symptom to cultural norm.

Evidence

I am tempted to see this reading as a kind of optical illusion (or photographic enlargement) of an unwittingly genealogical type, in which certain latent or subordinate, properly postmodernist, features of Flaubert’s style are anachronistically foregrounded. However, it affords an interesting lesson in periodization and in the dialectical restructuring of cultural dominants and subordinates. For these features, in Flaubert, were symptoms and strategies in that whole posthumous life and resentment of praxis which is denounced (with increasing sympathy) throughout the three thousand pages of Sartre Family Idiot. When such features become themselves the cultural norm, they shed all such forms of negative affect and become available for other, more decorative uses. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 118

Categorization

• DEFINE: Directly demonstrates the periodization of style the reader must explain: the same features mean differently as subordinate symptoms versus as cultural dominant.
• QUESTION: This bears on falsifiability of the cultural-dominant thesis — how does one distinguish a subordinate feature from a dominant one except circularly?
• XREF: Ties to reader’s key idea that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing, and to Flaubert as proto-postmodernist — also connects to Sartre’s existentialist reading of Flaubert. — connects to: In fifteen years the dominant cultural metaphor shifted from resisting face-as-barcode to accepting it. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 466; The same Latin phrase flipped meaning across eras due to cultural change — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 243