Benjamin theorized progressive art as technically advanced form, not political content

Evidence

Yet the transposition is not without its difficulties, and Benjamin’s conclusions remain problematical, particularly in his unresolved, ambiguous attitude toward modern industrial civilization, which seems to have fascinated him as much as it depressed him. The problem of propaganda in art can be solved, he maintains, by attention, not so much to the content of the work of art, as to its form: a progressive work of art is one which utilizes the most advanced artistic techniques, one in which, therefore, the artist lives his activity as a technician, and through this technical work finds a unity of purpose with the industrial worker. “The solidarity of the specialist with the proletariat … can never be anything but a mediated one.” This Communist “politization of art,” which he opposed to the Fascist “aesthetization of the machine,” was designed to harness to the cause of revolution that modernism to which other Marxist critics (Lukács, for instance) were hostile. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 171

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Benjamin-Frankfurt-School lineage core — the politization-of-art vs. fascist aesthetization-of-the-machine polarity recurs in later Frankfurt writings. — connects to: Benjamin reversed his earlier view that hermetic avant-garde art serves revolution; Technically advanced art can only achieve politically mediated effects — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 171
• DEFINE: Anti-Lukács move: form-as-politics inverts the content-based Marxist aesthetics that dominated orthodoxy.

Broader Connections

• Technically advanced art can only achieve politically mediated effects #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 171