The economic and cultural shifts of 1973 crystallized postmodernism as a new landscape

Evidence

Meanwhile, it is my sense that both levels in question, infrastructure and superstructures — the economic system and the cultural “structure of feeling” — somehow crystallized in the great shock of the crises of 1973 (the oil crisis, the end of the international gold standard, for all intents and purposes the end of the great wave of “wars of national liberation” and the beginning of the end of traditional communism), which, now that the dust clouds have rolled away, disclose the existence, already in place, of a strange new landscape: the landscape the essays in this book try to describe (along with an increasing number of other probes and hypothetical accounts). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 29

Categorization

• QUESTION: A precise dating claim — that the 1973 crises (oil, gold standard end, decolonization wave ending, traditional communism starting to end) jointly crystallized the postmodern cultural-economic landscape. Potentially falsifiable if someone can show postmodern traits predating 1973.
• SEED: Could seed a concrete explainer essay: ‘What happened in 1973?’ — the year when the economic base and cultural superstructure allegedly congealed together, walking a modern reader through each event in the bracket.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s reading purpose about periodizing aesthetic style — a concrete anchor date for when the ‘cultural dominant’ allegedly switches from modernism to postmodernism. — connects to: Jameson’s periodization of postmodernism rests on intuition, not empirical economics — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 497; The Soviet collapse and neoliberal advance explain Jameson’s sharpening postmodern critique. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 307; Jameson periodized postmodernism into a creative seventies phase followed by regression. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 306 (+4 more)