Editing Postmodernism (section)

===Frederic Jameson's Marxist rejoinder===
The appearance of linguistic relativism also inspired an extensive rebuttal by the [[Marxism|Marxist]] critic [[Fredric Jameson]].{{sfn|Bertens|1995|page=108}} Building upon the theoretical foundations laid out by the Marxist economist [[Ernst Mandel]]{{sfn|Buchanan|2018}} and observations in the early work of the sociologist [[Jean Baudrillard]],{{sfn|Connor|2004|page=3}} Jameson developed his own conception of the postmodern as "the cultural logic of [[late capitalism]]" in the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods.{{sfn|Connor|2004|pages=3–4}}{{sfn|Buchanan|2018}} According to Jameson, because the postmodernism is result of political and historical circumstances that make up the social world, it is not something that can be simply embraced or condemned. Instead, it must be analyzed and understood so that we may confront the world as it is.{{sfn|Roberts|2000|p=120}}

Jameson categorizes a variety of features of the postmodern. One is the elision of the distinction between high culture and mass culture.{{sfn|Roberts|2000|p=121}} Also, because of our loss of a unified "bourgeois ego", subjectivity is less focused, and we experience what he terms a "waning of the affect", an emotional disengagement from the social world.{{sfn|Roberts|2000|p=124}} This loss of significance leads to what he calls "depthlessness", a difficulty in getting beneath the surfaces of cultural objects to find any deeper significance than is offered directly to the subject.{{sfn|Roberts|2000|p=126}} Reduced to a set of styles, history looses its political force.{{sfn|Roberts|2000|p=128}} This phenomenon finds expression, for instance, in the shift from "parody", in which styles are mixed in the interest of making a point, to "pastiche", in which styles are mixed together without attention to their original contexts.{{sfn|Roberts|2000|p=133}}