Formal decorative patterns can encode and dream real social contradictions they cannot consciously grasp

Evidence

We find a similar view of art as imaginary resolution, this time to be sure in the context of a primitive or preclass society, in the remarkable pages consecrated by Lévi-Strauss to the peculiar decorative art of the Caduveo Indians. … On the formal or purely stylistic level he sees the specificity of this art as a kind of dialectical interaction between symmetry and asymmetry, “a complex situation corresponding to two contradictory forms of duality, which results in a compromise realized by a secondary opposition between the ideal axis of the object and that of the figure it represents.” … Thus an abstract formal pattern proves to have been the attempt to “solve” a real social contradiction on an imaginary mode: “since they were unable to come to consciousness [of this contradiction] and to live it, they began to dream it.” — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 741

Categorization

• XREF: Lévi-Strauss’s Caduveo analysis is the same imaginary-resolution structure as Sartre’s Flaubert, which is Jameson’s point — this validates the parallelism across culture; connects to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s figures of dream and riddle. — connects to: Formal technical problems in drama mirror social problems of isolation — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2237; Symbolism signals a class unable to take stock of its own reality — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 682; Literature formally resolves, in the imaginary, social contradictions that cannot be resolved in reality — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 740 (+5 more)
• SEED: The idea that a society ‘dreams’ its unresolved contradictions through decorative art offers a lens for an essay on how contemporary aesthetic form encodes political contradictions we cannot consciously live.

Broader Connections

• Art works expose social contradictions through their internal formal tensions #corroborates (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 19
• Art expresses utopian harmony negatively by embodying contradictions unresolved #corroborates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 549
• Avant-garde art communicates by breaking the propositional structure of discourse itself #expands (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 313