In late capitalism, perception-renewing defamiliarization has lost its critical function

Evidence

I have touched on several interpretive moves in Macrae-Gibson’s article without recording the basic formulations in which he frames his sense of the function of this new kind of building. These are as follows: “Perspective illusion and perspective contradiction are used throughout Gehry’s house, and many of his other projects, to prevent the formation of an intellectual picture that might destroy the continual immediacy of perceptual shock… Such illusions and contradictions force one to continually question the nature of what one sees, to alter the definition of reality, in the end, from the memory of a thing to the perception of that thing.” … Such formulations, with their familiar stress on the vocation of art to restimulate perception, to reconquer a freshness of experience back from the habituated and reified numbness of everyday life in the fallen world, bring us to the very heart of the essential modernism of Macrae-Gibson’s aesthetic. The Russian formalists, of course, codified such views most powerfully and durably, but something similar can be found in all the modernist theories, from Pound to surrealism and phenomenology, and across all the arts, from architecture to music and literature (and even film). I believe, for a number of reasons, that this remarkable aesthetic is today meaningless and must be admired as one of the most intense historical achievements of the cultural past (along with the Renaissance or the Greeks or the Tang dynasty). In the wholly built and constructed universe of late capitalism, from which nature has at last been effectively abolished and in which human praxis — in the degraded form of information, manipulation, and reification — has penetrated the older autonomous sphere of culture and even the Unconscious itself, the Utopia of a renewal of perception has no place to go. It is not clear, to put it crudely and succinctly, why, in an environment of sheer advertising simulacra and images, we should even want to sharpen and renew our perception of those things. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 312

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is the test case for whether the cultural-dominant thesis is falsifiable — Jameson dismisses a whole aesthetic tradition as meaningless under late capitalism; could a counterexample (e.g. contemporary slow-cinema or ‘attention restoration’ art) falsify that?
• DEFINE: Recaps the modernist defamiliarization doctrine (Russian formalists through surrealism/phenomenology) before declaring it obsolete.
• XREF: Jameson’s ‘renewal of perception’ as modernist religio echoes the concept’s rehabilitation in recent cognitive-science writing on attention and aesthetics; also contrasts with earlier chapter material on the waning of affect. — connects to: Under late capitalism, utopian thought reversed its function and now serves as negation — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 222