Modernism’s form carried a political charge its academic interpreters denied

Evidence

Whoever says “new,” however, or deplores the loss of its concept in a postmodern age, also fatally raises the spectre of Revolution itself, in the sense in which its concept once embodied the ultimate vision of the Novum become absolute and extending itself into the smallest crannies and details of a lifeworld transformed. The inveterate recourse to a vocabulary of political revolution, and the aesthetic avant-garde’s often narcissistic affectation of the trappings of their political opposite numbers, suggest a politicality in the very form of the modernisms that casts some doubt on the reassurances of their academic ideologies, who taught us again and again that the moderns were not political, or even socially very conscious. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 679

Categorization

• XREF: Ties the formal analysis to the reader’s interest in style-as-economy’s-appearance — politicality is felt in form itself, not merely biography. — connects to: Modernism’s aesthetic withdrawal from reality was a retreat from politics — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 216; Expellees and repatriates were denied the migrant label by official discourse and scholarship — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 53