Nineteenth-century ideology shared a lexicon for transcending instrumentalization

Evidence

So religion, in this particular sense, takes its place irr that complex of ideological themes and terms with which the nineteenth century sought to explore the new world of universal instrumentalization and to express its bewilderment at what that world excluded as much as at what it contained: other motifs, some of which appear in the evocation of the pilgrims quoted above, are the “idea” or the “ideal” (generally art or love) as that which allows one to transcend the intolerable double bind of means and ends; the somewhat lower but also more overtly social concept of the “philanthropic,” as we observed it at work in the previous chapter-a conception of a form of social action which would not be that of mere “interest, ” or would, in other words, tran­ scend the antivalue of the purely instrumental; Conrad’s term “senti­ mentalism”, finally, which comes to designate activities that cannot be reduced to interested motives and must therefore be credited to the account of some unbusinesslike and whimsically nonserious caprice (the Gidean acte gratuit will be a final, more heroic avatar of this still fairly leisure-class attribute) . — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6157

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Weber on instrumental rationality and Lukacs on reification; also pairs with the ‘means and ends double bind’ theme elsewhere in Jameson. — connects to: Nineteenth-century claim-making became cosmopolitan, modular, and autonomous — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 348