Aesthetic comparisons across eras secretly measure the whole mode of production

Evidence

All the enumeration of sheerly cultural traits comes down to this catachresis, or four-term metaphor: we concoct some proposition about the qualitative superiority of the musical production of the eighteenthcentury German principalities only in order to censure or to celebrate the commercial-technological engenderment of music in our own. That manifest comparison is the cover and the vehicle for a latent one in which we try to construct a feeling for daily life in the ancien regime so as, in a next step, to reconstruct a feeling for what is peculiar and specific, original and historic, in the present. Under the guise of specialized history, therefore, we are still doing general or universal history, which is destined to end up in Postmodernism theory, as the sequence of Brechtian estrangement operations outlined above makes plain. These are then the terms and conditions under which we can argue about the respective “greatness” of Mahler and Phil Glass, or Eisenstein and MTV, but they extend far beyond the aesthetic or the cultural as such, becoming meaningful or intelligible only when they reach the terrain of the production of material life and the limits and potentialities it (dialectically) imposes on human praxis, including cultural praxis. What is now at stake is relative systemic alienation itself and the dialectical relationship between the limits of the base and the possibilities of the superstructure within any given system or systemic moment: its internal quotient of misery and the determinate potentiality of bodily and spiritual transfiguration it also affords, or conquers. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 659

Categorization

• DEFINE: This explains the catachresis whose ‘manifest comparison’ (music across eras) veils a ‘latent’ one (feeling for daily life across systems) — a key move for understanding how periodization actually works.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated goal: style as the economy’s way of appearing, and the base/superstructure relation framing falsifiability of the cultural-dominant thesis. — connects to: Whether art reflects class passively or actively depends on the critic’s historical distance — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 739; Aesthetic preference often quietly drives ecological choices — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 722