The postmodern concept cannot be disproved because its voices are radically separated

Evidence

“Postmodernism” is itself the prime example of the conceptuality that results from such a system, in which reality itself is organized a little like those networks of political cells whose members have only met their immediate opposite numbers. Within this “concept,” then, that coexistence of distinct representations we already know, but whose unique operations we have not sufficiently admired, can be compared to schizophrenia, if this last is really what Pynchon tells us it is (“Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic. He enters a staff meeting and the room is suddenly full of people”). A roomful of people, indeed, solicit us in incompatible directions that we entertain all at once: one subject position assuring us of the remarkable new global elegance of its daily life and forms; another one marveling at the spread of democracy, with all those new “voices” sounding out of hitherto silent parts of the globe or inaudible class strata (just wait a while, they will be here, to join their voices to the rest); other more querulous and “realistic” tongues reminding us of the incompetences of late capitalism, with its delirious paper-money constructions rising out of sight, its Debt, the rapidity of the flight of factories matched only by the opening of new junk-food chains, the sheer immiseration of structural homelessness, let alone unemployment, and that well-known thing called urban “blight” or “decay” which the media wraps brightly up in drug melodramas and violence porn when it judges the theme perilously close to being threadbare. None of these voices can be said to contradict the others; not “discourses” but only propositions do that, and the identity of identity and nonidentity does not seem very satisfactory for this one, for which “coexistence” is too reassuring a term as well, implying some ultimate chance of intergalactic collision in which matter and antimatter might finally meet and shake hands. … As an ideology which is also a reality, the “postmodern” cannot be disproved insofar as its fundamental feature is the radical separation of all the levels and voices whose recombination in their totality could alone disprove it. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 799

Categorization

• QUESTION: Directly relevant to the reader’s falsifiability test: Jameson names the structural reason a ‘cultural dominant’ is unfalsifiable — voices are radically separated so no recombination can contradict them. Is that a feature of the theory or a dodge?
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing sentence — ‘the postmodern cannot be disproved insofar as its fundamental feature is the radical separation of all the levels and voices’ — is the crux of the whole falsifiability problem the reader is pushing on; they will sit with this mechanism for days.
• XREF: connects to: The first affirmative postmodern elements were assembled yet never crystallized — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 25; Postmodern fragmentation prevents picturing a radically different future at all — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 364; Poststructuralist theory’s repudiation of stable subjects collapsed inquiry into futile conversation — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 282 (+1 more)