Artistic raw material in pre-industrial societies is immediately meaningful, needing no mediation.

Evidence

In the art works of a preindustrialized, agricultural or tribal society, the artist’s raw material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning, requiring no preliminary explanation or justification on the part of the writer. The story needs no background in time because the culture knows no history: each generation repeats the same experiences, reinvents the same basic human situations as though for the first time. The social institutions are not felt as external traditions, as forbidding and incomprehensible edifices; authority is vested in the king or priest, is immanent to them. … The works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset. The writer uses them, but he does not need to demonstrate their meaning beforehand: in the language of Hegel, this raw material needs no mediation. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 345

Categorization

• XREF: This is the dialectical ground from which Jameson will oppose Benjamin’s and Adorno’s differing responses to the loss of aura/mediation in the industrial era — the movement from concrete to abstract raw material.
• DEFINE: Defines the concrete, pre-mediated raw material as the baseline against which the modern problematic of mediation is measured.