Industrial-era art loses its concrete human center as elements disperse into contingency.

Evidence

When we turn from such a work to the literature of the industrial era, everything changes. The elements of the work begin to flee their human center: a kind of dissolution of the human sets in, a kind of centrifugal dispersal in which paths lead out at every point into the contingent, into brute fact and matter, into the not-human. Even those most basic components of the story, the characters themselves, become problematical: now they have personalities, and the choice of personality traits, the portrayal of the hero as dreamy and idealistic rather than choleric and cynical, demands organic justification within the work itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 346

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Lukácsian dynamic of reification applied to narrative form — the loss of totality and the consequent need for artistic mediation, connecting directly to Lukács’s ‘The Ideology of Modernism’ and reification theory. — connects to: The objects that nourished an artistic movement vanish when their production economy changes — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 209; Postmodern architecture abandons the centered human perspective built into modernity.; Postmodern space disperses elements where modern work agglomerated them (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: The ‘dissolution of the human’ and centrifugal dispersal into brute fact parallels how grafted/infrastructure trees shift from living, meaningful presences to neutralized objects — the same move from concrete immediacy to abstract mediation Jameson describes.

Broader Connections

• Postmodern architecture abandons the centered human perspective built into modernity. #exemplifies (0.85)
• Postmodern space disperses elements where modern work agglomerated them #expands (0.80)
• A painting loses its meaning as symbolic act once its originating situation is lost #corroborates (0.80)
• Modernist artists deliberately abandoned the heroic image of humanity #corroborates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 849