Treating the market as a totalizing concept shifts explanation from production to exchange

Evidence

What must first be noted is that “the market” is in Michaels what is today often contemptuously described as a totalizing concept. In this he parts company with the mainstream of the New Historicism, which, in both its Renaissance and Victorian variants, does not seem to pose or presuppose any absent yet all-informing totality or system of this kind. It seems superfluous to point out what Michaels systematically exploits in a variety of ways: namely, that this particular way of “naming the system” displaces the emphasis — and the types of explanations called for — from production or distribution to exchange and consumption. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 474

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s core concern with how economic structures become cultural-analytical lenses; also echoes reader’s goal of mapping style to economic base. — connects to: Exchange becomes totalized across society by encroaching on production — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1376; The cinema analogy splits a product’s exchange value from its experienced value — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 67