The postmodern needs prior knowledge of the system to even begin

Evidence

This is indeed another reason why the representation of “decisionmaking” — whether it be the old-fashioned realistic picture of the boardroom or some modern indirect and modernist approach by way of the problem of representing it in the first place — breaks off unceremoniously in the postmodern, which presupposes as its entry ticket a kind of blase knowledge in advance of how the system functions. Adorno and Horkheimer’s intuition of Hollywood was in this respect prophetic of the later system as a whole: “the truth that [movies and radio] are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce.” They had in mind the now classic Hollywood defense of mediocrity, not merely in terms of the general public’s taste but in terms of their own function as a business selling products to a public with those tastes. As with all arguments from the “public,” then, a seriality results in which the public becomes a phantasmatic other to every single one of its members, each of whom — whatever his or her reactions to this particular mediocre product — has also learned and interiorized the profit motive doctrine that excuses it on the grounds of the motivations of “everyone else.” It is like lefthanded people being forced to use tools made for right-handers: the knowledge is built into the consumption, which it discounts in advance. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 753

Categorization

• XREF: The lefthanded-tools analogy and interiorized profit-motive mirror the ‘blase knowledge in advance’ and second-nature argument — connects to the broader mass-culture critique in Horkheimer/Adorno that frames this reading project. — connects to: Postmodernism theory makes uncertainty about the age into its founding clue — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 10; Postmodernism theory cannot produce a stable inside-outside position for its own observers — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 197; Periodizing postmodernism as a unified system may betray its own logic of difference — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 739 (+7 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Postmodernism theory makes uncertainty about the age into its founding clue — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 10; Postmodernism theory cannot produce a stable inside-outside position for its own observers — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 197; Periodizing postmodernism as a unified system may betray its own logic of difference — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 739 (+7 more)