Modernist difficulty in poetry and philosophy counters the cliches accelerated by commercial reading

Evidence

The parallel with language is only too clear, and it is enough to evoke the fad for rapid reading and the habitual conscious or unconscious skimming of newspaper and advertising slogans, for us to understand the deeper social reasons for the stubborn insistence of modern poetry on the materiality and density of language, on words felt not as transparency but rather as things in themselves. So also in the realm of philosophy the bristling jargon of seemingly private languages is to be evaluated against the advertising copybook recommendations of “clarity” as the essence of “good writing”: whereas the latter seeks to hurry the reader past his own received ideas, difficulty is inscribed in the former as the sign of the effort which must be made to think real thoughts. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 69

Categorization

• XREF: This is Jameson’s recurring argument (Sartrean in origin, via Adorno’s ‘jargon of authenticity’ inverted) that aesthetic difficulty is a defense against reified everyday language — it recurs throughout his later work as the valorization of Brechtian estrangement. — connects to: Style ideals of clarity now serve the commodity logic of fast reading. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 18; Modernist literature works as a perception instrument whose form survives even rejected insights — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1839; Capital reabsorbed modernism’s cult of the new as commodity novelty — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 62
• DEFINE: Jameson defines the social function of modernist difficulty here: not elitism, but a force that forces genuine thought against the skimming habits of advertising culture.

Broader Connections

• Modernist literature works as a perception instrument whose form survives even rejected insights #corroborates (0.75) — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1839
• Capital reabsorbed modernism’s cult of the new as commodity novelty #complicates (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 62