Criticism uncovers historically-censored content rather than interpreting it

Evidence

What we have called interpretation is therefore a misnomer: content does not need to be treated or interpreted, precisely because it is essentially and immediately meaningful in itself, meaningful as gestures in situation are meaningful, or sentences in a conversation. Content is already concrete, in that it is essentially social and historical experience, and we may say of our own interpretive or hermeneutic work what the sculptor said of his stone, that it sufficed to remove all extraneous portions for the statue to appear, already latent in the marble block. Thus the process of criticism is not so much an interpretation of content as it is a revealing of it, a laying bare, a restoration of the original message, the original experience, beneath the distortions of the various kinds of censorship that have been at work upon it; and this revelation takes the form of an explanation of why the content was so distorted and is thus inseparable from a description of the mechanisms of this censorship itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 770

Categorization

• XREF: The sculptor/statue figure echoes the hermeneutic tradition Jameson inherits; the censorship model prefigures his later work on ideology as structural distortion.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that criticism must explain WHY content was distorted, not merely restore it, is a distinctive dialectical move that fuses hermeneutics with ideology critique.