Totalizing concepts prove more diagnostically productive than going without them

Evidence

This observation is not, in a book with the title of this one, a criticism; in my opinion, it is diagnostically more productive to have a totalizing concept than to try to make one’s way without one. The Frankfurt School did not proceed otherwise, with its often somewhat fuzzy conception of “late capitalism” (or, alternately, the more Weberian “administered society”). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 476

Categorization

• DEFINE: An key self-defense: totalizing explanation is a deliberate method, not a failure of rigor.
• XREF: Directly bears on the reader’s falsifiability concern about ‘cultural dominant’ — Jameson here asserts the value of unfalsifiable totalizing concepts as diagnostic tools. — connects to: Totalizing analysis reveals progressive kernels inside ostensibly reactionary phenomena — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 223; Science’s paralogy is the antimodel to the totalizing performativity system — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 444
• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-level claim: the value of a totalizing concept is diagnostic productivity, not empirical confirmability — a serious methodological point worth sitting with.