Modernist art’s appeal rested on its archaic, individual craft within a collectivized economy.

Evidence

But there is a deeper reason for the disappearance of the Great Writer under Postmodernism, and it is simply this, sometimes called “uneven development”: in an age of monopolies (and trade unions), of increasing institutionalized collectivization, there is always a lag. Some parts of the economy are still archaic, handicraft enclaves; some are more modern and futuristic than the future itself. Modern art, in this respect, drew its power and its possibilities from being a backwater and an archaic holdover within a modernizing economy: it glorified, celebrated, and dramatized older forms of individual production which the new mode of production was elsewhere on the point of displacing and blotting out. Aesthetic production then offered the Utopian vision of a more human production generally; and in the world of the monopoly stage of capitalism it exercised a fascination by way of the image it offered of a Utopian transformation of human life. Joyce in his rooms in Paris singlehandedly produces a whole world, all by himself and beholden to no one; but the human beings in the streets outside those rooms have no comparable sense of power and control, of human productivity; none of the feeling of freedom and autonomy that comes when, like Joyce, you can make or at least share in making your own decisions. As a form of production, then, modernism (including the Great Artists and producers) gives off a message that has little to do with the content of the individual works: it is the aesthetic as sheer autonomy, as the satisfactions of handicraft transfigured. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 670

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing frame about style being the economy’s way of appearing — here the mechanism of ‘uneven development’ explaining modernism’s autonomy-message is precisely that periodizing relation.
• DEFINE: Introduces how ‘uneven development’ functions as the economic-basis explanation for why modernism could celebrate the solitary producer.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that modernism’s real message was formal autonomy — ‘the satisfactions of handicraft transfigured’ — independent of content, is a dense pivot that reframes aesthetic history as economic symptom rather than content history.