Present cultural forms carry disengageable seeds of the future

Evidence

On the classical Marxian view, the seeds of the future already exist within the present and must be conceptually disengaged from it, both through analysis and through political praxis (the workers of the Paris Commune, Marx once remarked in a striking phrase, “have no ideals to realize”; they merely sought to disengage emergent forms of new social relations from the older capitalist social relations in which the former had already begun to stir). In place of the temptation either to denounce the complacencies of Postmodernism as some final symptom of decadence or to salute the new forms as the harbingers of a new technological and technocratic Utopia, it seems more appropriate to assess the new cultural production within the working hypothesis of a general modification of culture itself with the social restructuring of late capitalism as a system. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 190

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core goal: this is the methodological key to ‘style as the economy’s way of appearing’ — aesthetic form as the site where future social relations can be disengaged from present capitalism. — connects to: Every generation knows it will be judged by future standards it cannot foresee — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 816; Higher culture’s remembered images point to a future that dissolves the present order. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 290; Grünberg’s optimists saw a higher culture emerging from decaying forms. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 90 (+3 more)