You cannot evaluate your own culture from outside it

Evidence

Although transcending your origins in order to evaluate them has been the opening move in cultural criticism at least since Jeremiah, it is surely a mistake to take this move at face value: not so much because you can’t really transcend your culture but because, if you could, you wouldn’t have any terms of evaluation left — except, perhaps, theological ones. It thus seems wrong to think of the culture you live in as the object of your affections: you don’t like it or dislike it, you exist in it, and the things you like and dislike exist in it too. Even Bartleby-like refusals of the world remain inextricably linked to it — what could count as a more powerful exercize of the right to freedom of contract than Bartleby’s successful refusal to enter into any contracts? — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 463

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense and paradigm-shifting: the impossibility of the critical outside—you exist in the culture, and even refusal (Bartleby) is a move within its logic. Resists one-sentence summary and lands squarely on the reader’s cognitive-mapping goal.
• XREF: Powerfully parallels the ‘waning of affect’ and the impossibility of an oppositional stance in late capitalism—same structure as the parody/pastiche distinction where no authentic prior exists to stand on. — connects to: No consciousness, not even God’s, can view reality’s totality from outside. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 807; Coexisting cultures cannot be ranked by any single historical clock. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 822
• BMF: Bartleby’s refusal as the purest exercise of freedom of contract evokes the logic of economic refusal in ‘We’ (D-503’s alienation), the excluded a-team in ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’, and the corporate dropout frames of ‘Home Boy’ and ‘A Very Minor Prophet’—all depicting refusal as inside the system it refuses.