The taboo on totality reflects social determinants, not mere intellectual progress.

Evidence

But the question of totalizing thought can also be staged in a different way, interrogating it not for its truth content or validity but rather for its historical conditions of possibility. This is then no longer to philosophize exactly, or, if you prefer, to philosophize on a symptomal level, in which we step back and estrange our immediate judgments on a given concept (“the most advanced postmodern thought teaches us not to deploy concepts of totality or periodization”) by way of asking the question about the social determinants that enable or shut down thought. Does the current taboo on totality simply result from philosophical progress and increased self-consciousness? Is it because we have today attained a state of theoretical enlightenment and conceptual sophistication that permit us to avoid the grosser errors and blunders of the oldfashioned thinkers of the past (most notably Hegel)? That may be so, but it ignores Rorty’s lesson and would also require some kind of historical justification in its own right (in which the invention of “materialism” would presumably intervene). This hubris of the present and of the living can be avoided by posing the issue in a somewhat different way: namely, why it is that “concepts of totality” have seemed necessary and unavoidable at certain historical moments and, on the contrary, noxious and unthinkable at others. … Such nominalism would probably turn out to have several prehistories or overdeterminations: the moment of existentialism, for instance, in which some new social sense of isolated individuals (and of the horror of demography, as we have seen, particularly in Sartre) causes the older traditional “universals” to pale and lose their conceptual force and persuasiveness; the age-old tradition of Anglo-American empiricism as well, which emerges from this death of the concept with renewed force in a paradoxically “theoretical” and hyperintellectual age. There is, of course, a sense in which the slogan “Postmodernism” means all this, too; but then in that case it is not the explanation but what remains to be explained. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 859

Categorization

• QUESTION: Can the historical conditions of possibility approach itself be tested? This is the falsifiability question for the whole book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘hubris of the present’ move — refusing to take the modernity of one’s own concepts as progress — is a genuinely dense, paradigm-level maneuver worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own goal of mapping their position in the world system — the nominalism argument gives a handle on one’s own situatedness.