The historical narrative of stages was essential to thinking capitalism as a system

Evidence

What will then happen to this historical narrative, above all in the thought and work of Adam Smith, is that having now produced that object of study which is the specifically contemporary mode of production, or capitalism, the historical scaffolding of the precapitalist stages tends to fall away and lend both Smith’s and Marx’s models of capitalism a synchronic appearance. But Meek wants to argue fthat the historical narrative was essential to the very possibility of thinking capitalism as a system, synchronic or not; and something like that will remain my own position with respect to that “stage” or moment of capitalism some of us now seem to be calling “Postmodernism.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 861

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of periodizing postmodernism as a stage of capitalism — Jameson’s own position is being staked here. — connects to: Adorno linked the performer’s interpretive freedom to the stage of capitalism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 560
• QUESTION: If the historical scaffolding is essential to thinking capitalism synchronically, does acknowledging postmodernism as a ‘stage’ require reconstructing the whole four-stages scaffolding again?