Modernist criticism must first submit to modernism’s fascination to have binding force

Evidence

Nonetheless it seems to me that something more must be said in the face of such articulate defenses of modernism as Susan Sontag’s “new sensibility” or Ihab Hassan’s Literature of Silence. These theories reflect a coherent culture with which we are all familiar: John Cage’s music, Andy Warhol’s movies, novels by Burroughs, plays by Beckett, Godard, camp, Norman O. Brown, psychedelic experiences; and no critique can have any binding force which does not begin by submitting to the fascination of all these things as stylizations of reality. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 786

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Adorno/Benjamin stance — immanent critique that enters the object’s own terms rather than judging from outside, in contrast to Lukács’s external antimodernism flagged in the prior paragraph. — connects to: The critic’s critique of commodified art must begin as self-critique. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 788
• SEED: Possible essay: the discipline of immanent submission as a method of critique across domains — knowing a system from inside before condemning it.