Theorizing away the concept of totality serves capitalism by hiding it from political challenge

Evidence

I think myself that that euphoria is a compensation formation, in a situation in which, for a time, genuine (or “totalizing”) politics is no longer possible; it is necessary to add that what is lost in its absence, the global dimension, is very precisely the dimension of economics itself, or of the system, of private enterprise and the profit motive, which cannot be challenged on a local level. I believe that, en attendant, it will be politically productive, and will remain a modest form of genuine politics in its own right, to attend vigilantly to just such symptoms as the waning of the visibility of that global dimension, to the ideological resistance to the concept of totality, and to that epistemological razor of postmodern nominalism which shears away such apparent abstractions as the economic system and the social totality themselves, such that for an anticipation of the “concrete” is substituted the “merely particular,” eclipsing the “general” (in the form of the mode of production itself). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 713

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that postmodern nominalism — the very refusal of grand abstractions — functions as ideological protection for the economic system is dense and counterintuitive: skepticism itself becomes the servant of capital.
• XREF: connects to: Critical theory must analyze industrialized society as a whole rather than rank power blocs — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 684; Domination in advanced capitalism is masked as neutral administration and objectivity — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 186; In late capitalism cultural theory displaces tactical political questions (+6 more)