Aesthetics and political economy are jointly necessary for cultural research.

Evidence

“Only two paths stand open to mental research: aesthetics, and also political economy.” Stephane Mallarme, “Magie,” in Variations sur un sujet, in Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1945), p. 399. The phrase, which I used as an epigraph to Marxism and Form, emerges from a complex mediation on poetry, politics, economics, and class written in 1895 at the very dawn of high modernism itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 1012

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s stated goal of understanding style as the economy’s way of appearing; connects to the whole periodization thesis of the book. — connects to: Only aesthetics and political economy remain open paths for mental research.
• DEFINE: Encapsulates the book’s founding methodological premise in a single Mallarmé aphorism.