Contemporary cultural objects repress the socio-economic context that past ones merely lost

Evidence

This is, indeed, the hermeneutic dimension of dialectical thinking, which is called upon to restore to the abstract cultural fact, isolated on the level of the superstructure, its concrete context or situation; the latter has, of course, vanished when we have to do with cultural objects from the past. … But when we have to do with products of contemporary culture, this concrete situation becomes the object of repression to the degree that we wish to ignore the socio-economic situation in which we are really involved. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 694

Categorization

• XREF: Asymmetry between past and contemporary objects of cultural criticism — traces to Benjamin’s notion of aura and the loss of context, and structure in a way Jameson will elaborate in his later cultural-studies work. — connects to: Complaints about losing historicity coexist with culture obsessed with dead past styles — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 626; Postindustrial capitalism severs the continuity with the past that genetic criticism relied on — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 24; Technology has become decoupled from cultural form and no longer announces rupture (+1 more)
• QUESTION: This repression-vs-vanishing distinction deserves chasing: what does it imply for how we must read contemporary versus historical cultural artifacts?

Broader Connections

• Complaints about losing historicity coexist with culture obsessed with dead past styles #qualifies (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 626