Cultural forms can both cement existing relations and reveal they are fabricated.

Evidence

Culture is dialectical: everyday practices and conventional meaning secure existing relations of production in place, super-glue for what sucks—yet, everyday practices also bear out efforts of everyday people to improve the conditions in which they live, imparting the knowledge that social life is fabricated and could be differently so; it doesn’t have to be this way. In artworks and aesthetic cultural production like literature or TV, formal composition discloses this fabrication. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 334

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the dialectical base on which her entire immediacy argument stands — culture as both super-glue for the status quo and proof it could be otherwise.
• XREF: Directly echoes Jameson’s ‘the political unconscious’ / ideology as both legitimation and utopia — the reader is judging her structural debt to Jameson. — connects to: Naming the world through dialogue renders fixed reality into a transformable problem. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 547; Taken-for-granted cultural narratives exert the most power — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 143
• ADDENDUM: Bears on ‘Grafting & Growth’: the dialectic of tree-as-infrastructure parallels culture as both cementing and disclosed fabrication.