Fredric Jameson — Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

615 published claims from this book.

• 1980s photography lacks the sixties’ pervasive register of violence and pain
• 60s Utopian impulses fragmented into micropolitical movements and spatialized visions
• A being possessing speech cannot coherently imagine its own prior absence.
• A bestselling memoir can reduce a nation to a self-exculpating caricature
• A critic’s explanatory framework can collapse into mere textual evidence
• A Detroit revolutionary league nearly seized city power through multilevel strategy.
• A lost war can permanently disable a state’s repressive power.
• A nation’s internal self-image can diverge wildly from its global meaning
• A new cultural epoch is recognized only retrospectively after its preconditions jell.
• A painting loses its meaning as symbolic act once its originating situation is lost
• A period’s cultural stereotype is assembled from ideas of facts rather than facts themselves.
• A period’s supposed character largely derives from its own self-representation
• A standpoint theory can prevent sociologized thought from collapsing into consumerist pluralism.
• A technology must decline before its true nature can be shown
• Abstraction, enlightenment’s tool, liquidates its objects as fate once did.
• Academic disciplines adapt opportunistically to crisis topics rather than mirroring reality.
• Academics should police policy claims for plausibility rather than merely teach
• Adequate modernist criticism must read the economy both in and from the artwork
• Aesthetic comparisons across eras secretly measure the whole mode of production
• Aesthetic comparisons secretly express contests between modes of production.
• Aesthetic failure at representing sense data reveals the referent realism cannot
• Aesthetic modernism in Kafka required archaic survivals alongside modernizing economy.
• Aesthetics and political economy are jointly necessary for cultural research.
• Agency and system cannot be synthesized, only alternated between
• Alienation accurately describes working-class privation but not general spiritual malaise
• All science necessarily functions as ideology because no thinker escapes subjective positioning
• Allegorical narratives stage the failure to read rather than the failure to name
• American criticism’s anti-market stance descends from the genteel tradition unchanged
• An outdated interpretive framework can reveal the postmodern by failing to fit its object
• An unacknowledged party of Utopia quietly persists among artists and writers
• An unfinished-looking house can destabilize the everyday domestic order of its inhabitants
• Analysis and evaluation are distinct operations from taste and journalism
• Animation was the foundational laboratory that first spatialized time in audiovisual media
• Anti-system philosophy reproduces the reified system illusion it flees.
• Anti-theory defines theory as the splitting apart of terms that are actually inseparable.
• Anti-totalitarian fear of Utopia blames revolution for violence that counterrevolution originates
• Anti-Utopian anxiety fears socialism as simplification rather than greater complexity
• Antifoundational theories involuntarily grow their own hidden foundations
• Apocalyptic narratives can secretly gratify desires for depopulation and simpler life.
• Architecture can attempt to bridge the gap between abstract system-knowledge and daily lived experience.
• Architecture visibly bears economic scars that film represses and conceals
• Art and play no longer model nonalienated labor under late capitalism
• Art’s teaching function can be reclaimed in cognitively innovative, non-didactic form.
• Artistic aspiration in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie remains market desire in disguise
• Attacking the diachronic actually makes thinking history the central vocation of thought
• Attitudes toward aesthetic appearance determine positions on the guilt of art
• Awareness of global scale and the vast human backdrop shaped modernism’s impersonal stylization
• Ballard adapts persistence-of-vision optics to describe fragmented crisis experience
• Baudrillard equated media saturation with the schizophrenic loss of interiority
• Baudrillard’s equation of value with the sign launched a lasting semiotic chain reaction
• Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange describes value’s pre-institutional dissolution into smoke
• Becker’s maximization model resembles Sartrean freedom in its total responsibility
• Belief has been replaced by speaking ideological codes one must learn
• Belief is a pseudo-concept always attributed to other people, never oneself.
• Biblical literalism died when industrialization severed life-experience from agrarian reality
• Bloch finds Utopian content in humble rest after labor
• Blocked power over productive activity produces consumerism as compensation.
• Bonaventure Hotel’s spatial disorientation produces real economic failure, marking down all merchandise
• Boredom is a symptom of one’s own cultural and ideological limits
• Boredom with high modern classics reveals our own postmodernity
• Borges’s map and Magritte’s images cannot serve as figures for anything in postmodern theory
• Boring texts can be good while exciting texts can be degraded
• Calling new social movements postmodern is a tautology without critical force
• Capital precedes and shapes resistance rather than resistance driving capital
• Capital’s dominance is the real message of every cultural product
• Capital’s own logic of reification drives realism through modernism into postmodernism.
• Capitalism in Marx is a process that reprograms peoples, not a stage
• Capitalism must be judged as both catastrophe and progress simultaneously
• Capitalism’s historical contingency implies socialism’s failure is not final.
• Capitalist technological history divides into three machine revolutions
• Certain modernist precursors already contained what became postmodern
• Choosing between levels of agency description is practical, not theoretical.
• Civilization’s bondage breeds longing that becomes worship of a transfigured nature
• Class awareness dissolves when group corruption is framed as conspiracy, not class action.
• Class politics today operates by constructing working-class experience as the mediating core of coalitions
• Coexisting modes of production must be visible together for totality to be thinkable
• Cognitive mapping cancels out its own intended transcendence by re-spatializing.
• Cognitive mapping cannot literally be a map in the present era
• Cognitive mapping is a code word for a new kind of global class consciousness
• Collectivization has replaced market individualism even in daily life
• Colonial empire determines subjective life yet stays beyond lived experience
• Commercial television and experimental video now constitute the cultural dominant.
• Commercial television’s fictive time is a second-degree simulation of real fictiveness
• Commodified modernism collapses the distinction between real and imaginary negation.
• Commodity equivalence remains nonthinkable even after labor-theory explanation
• Commodity-foregrounding art fails to be political under late capital.
• Complaints about losing historicity coexist with culture obsessed with dead past styles
• Conceptual abstraction is itself a metaphorical act because it posits resemblance among distinct existents
• Conceptual art either deconstructs existing concepts or constructs concepts that do not yet exist
• Conceptualizing a mode of production requires coexisting distinct production systems
• Connotation in postmodern culture is always plural and simultaneous, not layered on pure signs.
• Conscious ideology has ceased to function in reproducing capitalism.
• Consumer culture’s desire-production reproduces itself autonomously without needing any external cause
• Consumption practices have replaced political conviction as ideology
• Contemporary art of every kind is experienced only as reception, never as production
• Contemporary capitalism should be renamed infantile capitalism since everyone is born into it
• Contemporary photographic segmentation may lack existing analytical categories
• Contemporary spectatorship values special effects as expensive form, not content
• Critical distance from capital has been abolished in postmodern space
• Criticism should recover a work’s original clumsiness rather than its refined difficulty
• Critiques of modernism can be hijacked for reactionary cultural politics
• Cultural reification produces consumer subalternity toward cultural producers
• Culture’s dissolution means total expansion, not its disappearance
• Cyberpunk expresses late capitalism better than Postmodernism proper
• Daily life changes under postmodernity must be deduced after the fact rather than experienced
• De Man’s wartime anti-Semitic article was a failed ironic resistance, not genuine prejudice.
• Death and historical fact are referents that resist all textualization
• Debates over postmodernism are fundamentally political judgments about capitalism.
• Decadence is a subset of a philosophy of history, not a self-contained theory
• Deconstructing sensory illusion requires first awakening illusion’s full power
• Deconstruction is essentially an eighteenth-century philosophical strategy
• Deconstructive narrative moves from doubting one metaphor to doubting language itself
• Defining postmodernism as one movement among others differs from calling it a cultural dominant
• DeMan posits metaphor as the cause rather than opponent of literal illusion
• DeMan’s ‘metaphor’ functions as a transcoding device, not a narrow trope.
• DeMan’s ascetic aesthetics contrast sharply with Barthes’ sensuous indulgence
• DeMan’s ascetic view links Romanticism to modernism through continuity rather than rupture.
• DeMan’s deconstructive system secretly relies on the self-consciousness it denies
• DeMan’s position is nominalism, not nihilism or materialism
• DeMan’s rhetorical promise unifies speech acts with allegory to generate history
• DeMan’s textual metaphor theory structurally parallels Marx’s value-form dialectic.
• DeMan’s turn from history to reading mirrors a generational retreat from diachronic narrative
• DeManian deconstruction rejects homologies because discourse precedes any content
• Demographic materialism replaces anthropomorphic history with natural history’s being
• Demography constitutes a new form of materialism beyond body or individual
• Depicted nature becomes a coded endorsement of industrial domination
• Depoliticized periods follow economic rhythms the way hunger follows the business cycle
• Depthlessness is the supreme formal feature of all postmodernisms.
• Describing the Constitution as a promise obscures institutional power.
• Deskilling in reading can figure nonalienated labor and a Utopian society
• Dominant cultural paradigms need not come from a society’s ruling agents
• Dystopian future-terror is class-based fear of proletarianization and spatial loss
• Each era has a cultural dominant medium that serves as its symptomatic index.
• Each historical stage of capital generates a unique type of space
• Each modernist avant-garde had a distinct redemptive or utopian vocation.
• Each position on postmodernism can be politically progressive or reactionary.
• Each postwar generation erases the political memory of the one before it.
• Early navigational instruments forced coordination of lived position with abstract totality
• Early photography physically immobilized subjects whose ordeal prefigures postmodern art’s effects
• Effective political programs only address problems their era can already solve
• Elites envy subordinate classes’ cohesion because economic necessity bonds the poor together.
• Enframing the present with futures-forecasting habits defuses the shock of imagined catastrophe
• Enlightenment thought posits a primal mythic unity that never actually existed
• Ethical critiques of capitalism undermine the very socialism they advocate
• Ethnicity’s romantic appeal wanes when groups multiply and reveal their media construction.
• Even identical aesthetic features differ in meaning across economic epochs.
• Even radical interventions like The Clash get reabsorbed by capital
• Even the escape from postmodern hyperspace is itself commodified and contained
• Even the most extreme market model secretly turns out to be a production model
• Evil as a category has become tedious and politically useless in contemporary culture.
• Expression requires a closed individual self, which paradoxically isolates that self completely.
• External difference and dialectical opposition are categorically distinct relations
• Fairy tales open onto wishful futures while heroic sagas are dominated by the past
• Fashion imagery turns alien and chilling when absorbed into science fiction codes.
• Fiction and fictive temporality are analytically separable from narrative structure.
• Fiction is the construction of foreshortened temporalities substituted for real time.
• Fifties complacency was a false happiness indistinguishable from its own misery.
• Fifties high art asserted authority by deliberately ignoring mass culture
• Film and architecture can philosophize in their own media rather than illustrating ideas
• Film and video are too close for one’s theory to translate onto the other.
• Film’s rise to dominance did not displace literature’s ideological authority
• First World subjects’ belief in postindustrial society distorts political practice.
• For Bloch the present moment is structurally unknowable, a blind spot in experience
• For the colonized, speaking itself replaces violence as the first act of self-assertion
• Formal markers in pastiche texts appear as traces of older forms
• Free media products conceal the total absence of consumer choice
• Free-market explanations fail because markets are social institutions shaped by state power and discrimination
• Future social forms are present within the current system, not outside it
• Gary Becker’s time-as-resource economics repeats Marx’s view that all value is time
• Gehry rejects narrative allusion in favor of hands-on material work
• Genres escaped literature and now typologize reality itself
• Genuine folk culture was colonized and extinguished by commodification from the midnineteenth century
• Global capital now operates with unprecedented freedom from organized resistance.
• Global economic realities operate as an absent cause expressible only through figures
• Global media coverage does restrain government torture and repression
• Global population growth itself transforms postmodern cultural experience
• Global postmodernism presupposes far greater modernization worldwide than modernism did
• Gober’s art produces the concept of utopian space, not utopian space itself
• Gothic effects require the artificial reinvigoration of the virtue-vice binary
• Great philosophical acts originate in clumsy, home-made simplicity beneath polished surfaces
• Greatness comparisons between artists only make sense across different paradigms.
• Greatness in early modernism was an objective career strategy, not inner talent.
• Group categories are anthropomorphic while class categories remain material and impure
• Groups become consumable images that erase their own violent histories
• Hegemony operates by recoding existing discourse, not by asserting one code’s priority
• High modernism emerged in the space opened by radical social movements
• High modernism springs from the uneven coexistence of archaic and modern structures.
• High modernism’s subversive power is situation-specific and ungeneralizable across nations.
• High-modernist architecture is blamed for destroying the traditional city
• Historical fiction now represents only our stereotypes about the past, never the past itself.
• Historicism means randomly cannibalizing all past styles, yielding the culture of the simulacrum
• History might be generated from the present’s own fantasy projections
• Human cultures historically vary with their material or productive basis
• Hyper-focused description in the nouveau roman cancels itself into its opposite
• Hyper-specific description paradoxically produces the most general imagery
• Ideological struggle now operates through representations and imagery rather than concepts.
• Ideology ends by being flattened into inert material signifiers in media.
• Ideology maps the individual subject onto total class structures.
• In late capitalism capital has expanded beyond the nation-state, leaving it archaic
• In late capitalism the economic base generates its cultural superstructures directly
• In late capitalism, perception-renewing defamiliarization has lost its critical function
• In postmodern capitalism even the hobby gets institutionalized and organized.
• In postmodern cinema, evil becomes an image drained of genuine menace
• In postmodernism, to modernise is the same thing as to antiquate.
• In the nostalgia mode, the history of aesthetic styles displaces real history.
• Individual subjects are inserted into discontinuous realities from private life to global capital
• Informational overload prevents viewers from ever mastering a videotext’s meaning
• Institutional critique traces museum trustees into global systems of capital
• Intellectual breakthroughs make old ways of speaking optional rather than exposing truth
• Intellectuals once held a strategic role legitimating the capitalist status quo.
• Interpretive reading gains purchase only where postmodern signifiers reduce to binary oppositions.
• Interpretive social theory must neither ignore nor treat self-descriptions as incorrigible.
• Islamic fundamentalist movements parallel sixties North American black movements
• Jameson insists postmodernism can neither be celebrated nor disavowed politically.
• Jameson rejects the poststructuralist claim that the centered subject never existed
• Japan’s unique economy stems from its non-Western culture
• Kennedy’s death marked television’s coming of age as a mass medium
• Landscape painting retroactively reveals nature and society as ideological representations
• Language can never directly express our immediate sensory experience because words are inherently universal
• Late Ballard trades extinction fantasies for inaccessible utopia filtered through toxics
• Late capitalism has eclipsed Nature as society’s radical other
• Late capitalism is the purest form of capital, colonizing nature and the unconscious
• Late capitalism makes people identical with their jobs, colonizing sleep and dreams
• Late capitalism marks a qualitative shift beyond both monopoly capitalism and colonial rivalry
• Legal language holds meaning across unforeseeable contexts through a promise-like indeterminacy
• Living humans approaching the total of all dead hominids erodes the past’s authority
• Long-range cultural groundwork is agency no less than the decisive final struggle
• Loss of temporal coherence in the subject produces fragmentary, aleatory cultural forms.
• Marginalized groups can no longer occupy the proletariat’s revolutionary role
• Marginalized groups reject postmodernism as a cover story for elite class interests
• Market capitalism reorganizes sacred space into Cartesian geometric homogeneity
• Market choice is a sham homologous to parliamentary democracy
• Market circulation is the first form in which social totality appears independent of individuals
• Market defenders secretly fear the very Utopian totality they claim to celebrate
• Market discourse cannot be analyzed apart from real market realities.
• Market discourse displaces the Marxian model by shifting from production to circulation
• Market ideology functions to repress freedom rather than secure it
• Market ideology is generated by the economic system itself as its necessary afterimage.
• Market ideology primarily targets state intervention, not consumption.
• Market ideology’s appeal rests on a metaphysical equation of markets with human nature itself
• Market rhetoric is the central ideological battleground of our time.
• Market rhetoric shifted attention from production to consumption
• Market-centered accounts of capitalism function as ideology masking production
• Marx saw market freedom and equality as real yet turning into their opposites
• Marx’s prediction holds if judged on the Grundrisse’s long timescale
• Marx’s value forms dialectically anticipate the metaphor theory of tenor and vehicle
• Marxism posits multiple distinct historical breaks, not a single linear transition
• Marxism’s goal is realizing philosophy by abolishing it
• Marxism’s true bourgeois homologues are neoliberals, not fascists.
• Mass culture, not high art, best captured 1950s everyday American reality.
• Mass media exaggerated progressive pedagogy’s reach while actual change stayed minimal.
• Materialist thought takes a different shape in each historical epoch
• Meaning in postmodern installations shifts as each element recontextualizes the others
• Mechanical materialism’s radical heterogeneity needs a unifying totality to stay coherent
• Mechanization and mediation of culture may have always existed, even precapitalist
• Media juxtaposition conceals the dialectical links between seemingly unrelated events
• Media representation and the market represent each other while democracy remains unrepresentable
• Memory has become a degraded repository of images and simulacra rather than authentic perception.
• Michaels’ book demonstrates New Historicist method without traditional themes
• Micropolitics and identity-group organizing are themselves postmodern phenomena
• Miserliness and spendthrift behavior are two failed attempts to escape money’s power.
• Mode-of-production thinking arises where rapid economic change makes backward areas visibly contrastable
• Modern art’s very production is driven by a nominalist imperative
• Modern panic over comprehensible existence parallels prehistoric fear of nature
• Modern rationality has expanded until almost nothing remains genuinely irrational or incomprehensible
• Modern theology’s casuistry legitimizes state violence while preserving Christian status
• Modernism doubted Being’s stability while postmodernism abandoned Being altogether
• Modernism gained hegemony by repressing naturalism, which now returns in postmodern form.
• Modernism is defined by market hostility while postmodernism affirms the market
• Modernism privileges temporal experience while postmodernism subordinates time to space
• Modernism pursues the New substantively while postmodernism only clocks variations
• Modernism, modernity, and modernization are distinct concepts with uneven circulation across nations
• Modernism’s antibourgeois stance depended on the bourgeoisie it opposed.
• Modernism’s enemy shifted from fallen social life to rival sign systems
• Modernism’s form carried a political charge its academic interpreters denied
• Modernism’s Gesamtkunstwerk presupposed a stable system of distinct arts, which postmodernism dissolves
• Modernism’s insistence on West-versus-rest difference makes Marxism itself a modernism
• Modernism’s status depends on whether it completed its mission or was interrupted
• Modernism’s utopian function was securing authentic experience against mass culture
• Modernist and postmodern religious revivals are not genuine returns to tradition.
• Modernist architecture aggressively repudiated the old city while postmodern buildings complacently coexist with it
• Modernist art’s appeal rested on its archaic, individual craft within a collectivized economy.
• Modernist classics entering university curricula in the 1960s simultaneously canonized and defused them
• Modernist form emerged to reconcile authentic individual experience with true global cognition
• Modernist forms were degraded by state bureaucratic adoption before postmodernism displaced them
• Modernist hermeneutics saved scripture by converting it to abstract existential themes
• Modernist inwardness paired with a utopian sense of self and world transformation
• Modernist machinery offered a representable emblem of energy that postmodern tech lacks
• Modernist spatial form unifies parts into a whole while postmodern spatialization disperses totality
• Modernist temporality grew from uneven development rather than modernization itself
• Modernity defines itself by a radical break with all prior and non-Western peoples
• Modernity defines itself partly through its relation to religion
• Modernity fragments and autonomizes the senses, each gaining new intensity
• Modernity names the felt conviction of newness that postmodernity has lost.
• Modernity’s sense of the New was an obligation felt as much as a liberation
• Money emerges as allegory, an abstraction that succeeds only by marking its own failure.
• Monopoly capitalism splits lived experience from the structures governing it
• Moral condemnation of postmodernism is a category mistake
• Morbid manifest content can distract from latent wish-fulfillment in cultural artifacts.
• Most modernist writers held left-leaning political sympathies
• Munch’s The Scream deconstructs the aesthetic of expression it embodies
• Music became spatialized rather than an object offered for contemplation
• Music functions as a fundamental class marker indexing Bourdieu’s social distinction
• Naming race off the table makes the harm itself disappear from consideration
• Narrative that reveals itself as mere image shifts discourse from language to media
• Narratives of political defeat can map global space better than triumphs
• Narrativization is distinct from actual narrative segments, and cheap
• Nazi Judeocide was inseparable from the regime’s anticommunist mission
• Neohistorical explanation flattens history into raw material, stripping its causal function
• Neoliberal legitimacy is secured by lifestyle knowhow rather than profit itself
• Neologisms can wield the real-world impact of a corporate merger.
• New codes can still be generated even when new philosophical systems are excluded
• New Historicism bans theoretical distance and leaves readers empty-handed
• New Historicism is best understood as a symptom of postmodern immanence
• New Historicism works offer competing historical and methodological readings
• New social movements and the global proletariat both stem from multinational capitalism.
• New social movements resist easy classification as products of or correctives to capitalism.
• Nineteenth-century realist novelists held an aesthetic commitment to society as stable Being
• No foundational critique links historicism’s growth to imperialist practice.
• Noise functions as a nonsign meaning the meaningless within communication systems
• Nominalism operates as a social-existential force in postmodern culture
• North American intellectuals lack the historical experience to judge occupied people’s choices
• Nostalgia films convey the past through stylistic connotation rather than representational accuracy
• Nostalgia films evade their present through lavish generational imagery.
• Nostalgia films express depersonalized curiosity rather than genuine longing
• Nouveau roman reading demands coordinating unrelated plot strings that shift without warning
• Objective time is produced by the measuring machine, not merely experienced
• Older aesthetics required concentrating on a single image sequence for organic meaning.
• Only aesthetics and political economy remain open paths for mental research.
• Our societies’ opacity makes social critique sound psychological or anthropological.
• Pastiche emerges from the loss of individual style and must be distinguished from parody.
• Pastiche enters where language’s failure to coincide with objects has already been structured.
• People’s lived sense of their era may be wholly unrelated to its structural reality
• Period concepts may correspond to no realities whatsoever
• Periodizing postmodernism as a unified system may betray its own logic of difference
• Personal identity depends on language’s temporal unification of past, present, and future
• Personal identity theory parallels the language of property and ownership
• Philosophers’ later intellectual turns are often political disengagements from earlier commitments
• Philosophical abstraction is itself a by-product of commodity exchange.
• Photographic reproduction replaces the real building as the consumed object
• Photography as early capitalism’s hyperreal art is hostile to imitation
• Photography reveals vision’s materiality, displacing the spiritual ideal of perception.
• Photography transforms minor art into canonical monumental works
• Photorealist painting depicts photographs of reality, not reality itself
• Place in contemporary America has dissolved into overlapping abstract spatial networks
• Pluralism is an ideology resting on the pseudoconcepts of democracy, media, and market.
• Political art today must invent radically new forms to represent global capital
• Political category mistakes often stem from transferring aesthetic concepts into politics
• Political commitment is aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism even when misguided
• Political movements that become media spectacles lose their real-world referent
• Political struggle is fundamentally waged over the legitimacy of concepts and ideologies
• Political theories are forms determined by social content, not freely chosen options.
• Political violence can install self-censoring avoidance of future commitment
• Post-Marxism is built on abandoning the dialectic as a mystification
• Postindustrial capitalism actually confirms rather than refutes Marx’s analysis
• Postindustrial society narratives ideologically mask continuing class struggle.
• Postmodern abstractions that claim universality are actually local and self-inverting.
• Postmodern aesthetic forms lift and cancel their cheap commercial origins rather than transcending them.
• Postmodern aesthetic production is wired directly into commodity production.
• Postmodern allegory is horizontal and relational rather than vertical and fixed
• Postmodern architectural appetite actually targets photography, not buildings
• Postmodern architecture abandons the centered human perspective built into modernity.
• Postmodern architecture achieves depth-suppression through immersive space that abolishes perspective
• Postmodern architecture deliberately packages an older structure inside a new, alien skin
• Postmodern architecture resists organization around individual authorial styles and names
• Postmodern art operates within media systems rather than unifying them into transcendent wholes
• Postmodern art raises doubt about realism’s capacity to convey the being of labor
• Postmodern art’s thwarting of perceptual unity differs from conceptual art’s critique of representation
• Postmodern city space lost its modernist sense of place and situatedness.
• Postmodern collaboration abandons the manifesto-driven vanguard project entirely
• Postmodern cultural productions both express and mystify new global space.
• Postmodern culture criticism targets left phenomena, creating a false impression of their culpability
• Postmodern culture denies the reality of general categories and collective identities.
• Postmodern culture is essentially visual with a slack and flabby linguistic element
• Postmodern cultures lack a stylistic norm that modernist deviation presupposed
• Postmodern discourse makes all cultural positions secretly political, except the overtly political
• Postmodern ethnicity is an optional consumer choice rather than an imposed identity.
• Postmodern fabulation substitutes invented history for real historical praxis
• Postmodern fantastic historiography has two mirror-spiral variants.
• Postmodern fantasy strains convey the real past better than historical facts.
• Postmodern films invent new categories where older conformity-and-rebellion terms fail.
• Postmodern fragments become logos with no identifiable product behind them
• Postmodern fragments function as narratives detached from any single referent
• Postmodern genres are artificial systems devised in imitation of natural ones
• Postmodern groups cannot be subjects, undermining any master narrative of history
• Postmodern heterogeneity is spatial rather than temporal, filed by place not history
• Postmodern historiographic collage forms a spatial historiography reflecting mental division of labor
• Postmodern hotels are climate-controlled vivariums sealed off from the city
• Postmodern hyperspace emerges from tension between two distinct spatial structures
• Postmodern hyperspace exceeds the body’s capacity to orient itself
• Postmodern identity is shaped by constant media channel-switching rather than fixed subjectivity
• Postmodern image culture operates on imaginary rather than material consumption.
• Postmodern image interplay is the ceaseless recapture of one narrative by another.
• Postmodern interest in the past functions as an in-group hobby, not genuine engagement
• Postmodern manifestos secretly still depend on the modernist tropes they reject
• Postmodern mental fragmentation internalizes social division of labor into cognition itself
• Postmodern montage delegitimizes conceptual transcendence in favor of immanence
• Postmodern montage inherits Brechtian and Eisensteinian pedagogical aims
• Postmodern nature imagery memorializes a nature already systemically eliminated by capitalism
• Postmodern objects resist restoration to any prior lived context.
• Postmodern painting offers critique without any subject left to be cured
• Postmodern painting simulates surrealism’s forms while lacking its psychic charge
• Postmodern pastiche blurs the present into a timeless simulacral past
• Postmodern pastiche empties the subject and borrows styles, where moderns invented their own worlds.
• Postmodern pathology displaces anxiety and alienation with the subject’s fragmentation
• Postmodern perception holds incompatible coordinates without unifying them
• Postmodern photography replaced image-to-referent matching with internal visual differentiation
• Postmodern quotation blocks demystification because all materials are equally degraded
• Postmodern realism yields only ideological images, never unmediated reality
• Postmodern religion dismantles modernist difference just as postmodern culture does.
• Postmodern social representation demands an interposed media term as its placeholder.
• Postmodern society has eliminated the old types of solitude for rich and poor alike
• Postmodern space disperses elements where modern work agglomerated them
• Postmodern space emerges only from the dialectical collision of old and new architectural forms
• Postmodern space is a real third expansion of global capitalism.
• Postmodern texts relate through difference rather than organic unity
• Postmodern theory prefers DNA-as-code because it is generative, not merely representational
• Postmodern theory replaces four inherited depth models with surfaces
• Postmodern theory turns every observation about the present into evidence of itself.
• Postmodern thinking defines itself by taboos against propositions and primary statements.
• Postmodern thought replaces class-based ideology with group-based consciousness.
• Postmodern villains occupy the structural role of the squares without any social content
• Postmodern wrapping preserves hierarchy but makes it reversible, unlike intertextuality
• Postmodernism abolishes the inside-outside distinction that modernism still presupposed
• Postmodernism as lifestyle expresses the consciousness of a new class fraction, the yuppies
• Postmodernism cannot be defined once and settled; it must be reworked each use
• Postmodernism cannot be understood apart from late capitalism’s economic structure
• Postmodernism elevates modernist aberrations into its dominant cultural logic
• Postmodernism emerges only once modernization is complete and nature is gone
• Postmodernism erases the high culture versus mass culture boundary.
• Postmodernism is a cultural dominant allowing coexisting subordinate features, not a uniform style.
• Postmodernism is a reflex of capitalism’s modification, not a new social order.
• Postmodernism is modernity’s completion, erasing the archaic that modernism still struggled against.
• Postmodernism is the first global cultural style of specifically North American origin.
• Postmodernism marks a fundamental mutation of culture’s social function
• Postmodernism replaced temporality with space and rejected phenomenological perception
• Postmodernism replaces the autonomous work with the decentered text
• Postmodernism theory cannot produce a stable inside-outside position for its own observers
• Postmodernism theory itself exemplifies the allegorical structures it describes
• Postmodernism theory makes uncertainty about the age into its founding clue
• Postmodernism treats consensus itself as an illusion produced by discourse
• Postmodernism’s breadth as a term lets it mediate between economic and cultural life.
• Postmodernism’s case rests on a radical break dated to 1960
• Postmodernism’s rejection of innovation still depends on the very notion of novelty.
• Postmodernism’s transgressive features have been absorbed into official Western public culture.
• Postmodernist texts resist thematic meaning and are flawed when interpretation succeeds
• Postmodernity abandons modern difference while retaining its technological infrastructure.
• Postmodernity erases the boundary between commodity and its image
• Postmodernity is defined by a forgotten capacity for historical thought
• Poststructuralism’s assault on historical thinking does not vindicate synchronic thought, which is self-contradictory.
• Poststructuralist critiques of authenticity form a shared tradition with anti-gold arguments.
• Poststructuralist theory is itself a postmodernist symptom, not a neutral tool
• Present cultural forms carry disengageable seeds of the future
• Present rooms become historicist simulacra when quoted and emptied of concrete life.
• Privilege produces gothic anxieties by sealing people off from visibility
• Privileged young people lack the guardedness that keeps them alive
• Problems can emerge from their own momentum when an argument is followed wholeheartedly
• Proper names are not unique labels but components of larger classifying systems
• Psychic fragmentation names the postmodern condition better than alienation does
• Public art absorbed taboo content in a successive widening of transgressions through the sixties
• Public choice theory mirrors left critique of media as resistance theory
• Radio serials merging in La Tia Julia exemplify postmodern totalizing
• Rave culture’s energy may be one symptom of a wider cultural depletion
• Reading heterogeneous texts side by side requires a unifying theoretical fiction like the homology.
• Reading underwent the same division of labor and Taylorization that transformed handcraft into industry
• Realism means representing the deathly underside of market desire, not pastoral escape
• Realist and modernist traces persist within postmodern culture.
• Reference problems are symptoms of historical transformation, not mere philosophical puzzles
• Reformists mistake ideology’s ideal image for a reality to be realized
• Reified commodities erase the traces of their production, letting consumers forget class
• Reified products block imaginative participation in their production yet remain consumable.
• Representations reveal more by failing than by succeeding
• Reproductive technology itself is postmodernism’s deepest subject
• Rhetorical theory undermines the autonomy of academic disciplines
• Rousseau offered multiple rival causes for humanity’s fall into history
• Rousseau’s construction-then-deconstruction is idiosyncratic and cannot be generalized to all great texts.
• Rousseau’s inequality meant feudal rank distinction, not economic disparity
• Rousseau’s Social Contract performs what it has shown to be impossible
• Sartre’s group theory leaves the category of social class underdeveloped
• Scaling a local political model to national movement is a spatial problem of representation.
• Schizophrenic disjunction as cultural style loses its morbid content and yields euphoria.
• Science fiction experiments with gender pronouns to model alternative social structures
• Science fiction uses the future to see its present, nostalgia uses the past
• Seeing local oppression as global colonization enables political reframing
• Seemingly realistic novels like Ragtime are secretly nonrepresentational holograms of ideologemes
• Segmented contemporary artwork pieces do not demystify one another
• Self-consciousness no longer functions as an adequate foundation for thought
• Self-styled radical critics today are actually liberals in weak form
• Semiotics and postmodern architecture were mutually justified by their shared populist, sign-emitting character
• Simulacrum logic actively reinforces late capitalism, not merely reflects it
• Social democrats assume correcting the ideal model can realize it
• Social fragmentation precedes and causes psychic fragmentation, not inner nature
• Socialism emerges within capitalism as existing structures rather than an ideal
• Societies that erase people later celebrate the victims’ lingering culture.
• Sociological description of art markets becomes explanatory only through diachronic narrative.
• Some modernisms are explicitly antimodern, protesting the very modernization they parallel
• Some postmodern buildings are designed to defeat photographic reproduction
• Sound recognition is more instantaneous and total than visual recognition
• Space and time are afterimages of the mode of production.
• Space’s aesthetic formulation mediates between cognition and sociopolitical consequences
• Spatial mapping incapacity cripples political as much as urban experience.
• Structuralism’s real value lay in making homologies, not in the concept of structure.
• Studying the postmodern inadvertently reveals more about the modern than about postmodernism
• Stylistic features change meaning when they shift from symptom to cultural norm.
• Surrealist layering of fragmented images persists across decades as a continuity
• Surrealist weightless imagery was motivated by the unconscious model
• System differentiation reproduces the whole system inside each subsystem and grows by internal disjunction
• Systematizing the unsystematic can force a historical way of thinking
• Systemic fear of personal losses seals the postmodern system without bribes
• Systemic realism and active political commitment can coexist rather than exclude each other
• Systems incorporate their excluded outside by giving it a name from their own vocabulary
• Technology is a figure for dead labor’s alienated counterfinality
• Technology results from capital’s development, not the reverse
• Television and media eliminated the small town’s experienced autonomy
• Television seeks rebirth through violence and market symbiosis
• Temporalized totality is never achieved but flees from itself.
• Textualization of the world is a form of postmodern spatialization
• The account of postmodernism originally lacked any social agency
• The Austro-Hungarian Empire was humane, tolerant, and an early multinational state
• The body grounds a psychic space lacking all ordinary spatial structure.
• The computer resists representation where the machine was eminently representable
• The corporation displaced individualism while the market persisted unchanged
• The death of the centered subject frees feeling but makes it impersonal and free-floating.
• The demand for equality originates in wage labor’s commodity equivalences
• The economic and cultural shifts of 1973 crystallized postmodernism as a new landscape
• The economics of late capitalism preceded its cultural forms by roughly a decade.
• The eighteenth century created a language of pleasure and pain for judgment.
• The elegance ideologeme depends on its punk negation, which has shed its class content.
• The expanded form of value is an endless provisional chain of equivalences
• The fifties’ revolt, not the sixties’ counterculture, is the truly dangerous force.
• The film In Time makes time serve as money to dramatize precarity
• The Freudian unconscious may be a historically contingent artifact, not a timeless structure
• The general will shows how abstraction artificially arises from particularity
• The gothic’s construction of evil is an empty category of pure Otherness.
• The gothic’s real subject is shelteredness, not protofeminist protest against rape
• The helicopter embodies postmodernist space by refusing static representation.
• The historical narrative of stages was essential to thinking capitalism as a system
• The homology is as crude an analytic tool as the base and superstructure model.
• The Kantian noumenon-phenomenon dualism mirrors the agency-system oscillation
• The labour theory of value must be distinguished from Marx’s value-form analysis
• The link between nature and memory is economic, not metaphysical
• The market cannot by definition be a collective project
• The market is an inescapable belief-structure one cannot step outside
• The market is as Utopian as socialism has been called
• The market operates as a totalizing logic underlying diverse aesthetic forms
• The market presents agency at an utterly impersonal scale.
• The Marxist will to master history remains indispensable even in the postmodern moment
• The modern-to-postmodern shift correlates with capitalism’s transformation from monopoly to multinational
• The modernist classics became reified monuments that paralyzed fresh form production.
• The monopoly corporation becomes the true subject of history in Michaels’s account.
• The Nietzschean insight that future misery is always ours defuses its alien otherness
• The nostalgic fall-golden-age narrative is right-wing, not Marxist, in origin.
• The nouveau roman’s stylization functions as democratic equipment for modern lived experience
• The past becomes a collection of images, the referent effaced into texts
• The philosophical test of market theory is the transition from socialism to capitalism
• The postmodern combination’s effect depends on radical register separation in our minds.
• The postmodern concept cannot be disproved because its voices are radically separated
• The postmodern epoch erases nature and all residual archaic features from human experience
• The postmodern needs prior knowledge of the system to even begin
• The postmodern present recasts all prior art as nostalgia and cultural stereotype
• The profit motive becomes invisible second nature through its universalization
• The quality’s inner figure-ground relation differs from the this-world relation
• The recent past is the least accessible period to direct understanding
• The rhetoric of difference may fail to articulate concrete social struggles
• The romantic hero of fifties cinema can no longer be produced in postmodern film.
• The Scream’s absent sound becomes visible vibration on a painted surface
• The semiotic code is the last and most visible secular postmodern idiolect
• The shift from Symbol to allegory marks the modernism-to-postmodernism break
• The subject’s unity is an effect of social configuration, not a premise
• The taboo on totality reflects social determinants, not mere intellectual progress.
• The theoretical turn to narrative is a cultural symptom, not a discovery.
• The twenties-thirties antithesis gets reified into image and symbolically reinvents the bourgeoisie
• The utopian ideal of deconstructive existence may already be socially realized as postmodernism
• The Vietnam War destroyed the traditional narrative paradigms of the war novel.
• The wrapper becomes its own category rather than a middle term
• Theological predestination is the first form of historical totality thinking
• Theories must be tested by their political function, not retracted
• Theorizing away the concept of totality serves capitalism by hiding it from political challenge
• Theory saturation makes any separatist stance itself another named theory
• Theory transforms quoted fragments into autonomous unities by wrapping texts in other texts.
• Three superimposed rhythms structure The Gold Standard and foreground economic causality
• Tolerance of difference may result from social homogenization that erases real difference.
• Total systems change, and human agency’s effects often subvert its intentions
• Total universalization of capitalism erases the concept of the system itself
• Totalization seeks fragile control of a fragile subject in an indifferent world
• Totalization today means unifying with an eye to power and control
• Totalizing approaches a boundary it can never actually cross
• Totalizing concepts prove more diagnostically productive than going without them
• Tracing common origins has ceased to be a temporal operation
• Traditional literary histories reduce texts to examples and force crude causalities upon them
• Transcoding between ideological codes is the most productive critical activity
• Transindividual structures, not authorial intention, anchor strong interpretation today.
• Treating the market as a totalizing concept shifts explanation from production to exchange
• Trompe l’oeil provides a vantage point outside modernism for criticizing representation.
• Two further positions reject the modern-postmodern break, dissolving postmodernism into modernism
• Unpolished, in-process writing draws more response than polished work
• Unpredictability serves as a futile strategy against being categorized by others.
• Urban alienation grows with the mental unmappability of city space
• US economic value first emerges in fiction through miserliness and masochism
• Utopian political imagination tests postmodernism’s capacity to imagine change
• Utopian vision is a necessary but insufficient ingredient of politics.
• Utopian visions reveal a system’s limits only through failed attempts at transcendence
• Video’s perpetual present resists being organized into textual memory
• Videotexts present a ceaseless random interaction of narrative signals contesting mental compartmentalization
• Voluntarism and determinism are false alternatives, since both commitment and passivity are socially produced
• Warhol’s shoe paintings deny the viewer any hermeneutic foothold.
• We consume the photograph’s value, not the photographed object’s
• What is called postmodern populism is really a symptom of cultural mutation
• When two signs collide, one genre’s codes dominate the other.
• Whether language-evolution debates count as scientific depends on conviction that society can change.
• With the collapse of high-modernist style, culture producers turned to imitating dead styles
• Without a center of reference, instrumental meanings collapse into the indifferent in-itself.
• Workers accept precarity as natural because dismissal feels synchronous and arbitrary
• Working politics requires coordinating local struggles with a global totalizing dimension
• You cannot evaluate your own culture from outside it