Capitalist alienation extended into urban social space, not just production

Evidence

This sense of cultural excess, however, was only part of the story. For that same artist was also subjected to those same processes of capitalist alienation which were inscribed now not only in the processes of production, to be suffered by the working class alone, but also in the very structure of social space as it was reconstituted in the modern city. The collage and the Cubist recompositions of perspective were the characteristic responses in the visual arts, and Eliot’s œuvre came to occupy so central a position in the literary imagination of the Anglo-Saxon elite – and, in an act of characteristic subordination, in the imagination of the Anglophone colonial elite as well – because he combined this sense of cultural excess with equally strong invocations of ‘Hollow Men’ and ‘Unreal City’. The Waste Land, with its fragmented surface, its polyglot ascription, its multicultural list of literary resource and ideological possibility, its malevolence towards working women and the sexuality of popular classes, its aristocratic affiliation, its dazzling technical resolution for the sense of unbelonging and inner ennui, is of course the central document of Anglo-Saxon modernism; Ulysses would be in most respects comparable, but most of its productive aspects come from the fact that it is not Anglo-Saxon. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 218

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my larger reading on modernism’s ideological subtext in the Rushdie chapter that precedes this one; also resonates with the supermarket/commodification reading of culture in this same section. — connects to: Historical materialism has begun to treat space and geography as causal forces in capitalism — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2207