c than it seems to have been: "It wasn't simply the appearance of another new movement, as in the past. It was a crucial change, which affected artists of all persuasions" (Levin 7). However, postmodernism, like modernism, reflects the age in which it was born. Levin says that postmodernism is impure:
It knows about shortages. It knows about inflation and devaluation. It is aware of the increased cost of objects. And so it quotes, scavanges, ransacks, recycles the past (Levin 7).
Modernism can be described as a cultural response, and Jameson extends this analysis to postmodernism as a reaction to modernism and to changes in society. Jameson says that his view of postmodernism is historical rather than structural, and this is in keeping with his view of the matter as cultural and thus as an organic element evolving from social interactions with and about art rather than from some structural definition of postmodernism:
I cannot stress too greatly the radical distinction between a view for which the postmodern is one (optional) among many other
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