Refusing to extend intrinsic criticism to the social is itself an ideological act.

Evidence

The logic of content is in the long run, we have said, social and historical in character. For it is clear that to articulate the relationship between the artistic fact as such and the larger social and historical reality to which it corresponds requires a gradual enlargement of critical focus, a widening of the scope of the critic’s reflection, which not every critic is prepared to effect, nor is it indeed required for every job of critical analysis. Yet to omit this enlargement, this movement from the intrinsic to the extrinsic, is itself an ideological act, to the degree to which it encourages belief in some ahistorical essence of art and of cultural activity in general. Thus, in a classic essay, R. H. Pearce has shown how the New Criticism was able to come to ideological terms with the historical dimension of literature by driving the latter back (I am tempted to say “repressing” it) into the notion of Language or medium, which is then as it were sealed off from the outside, so that the New Critics are able to stop their work at its boundaries while still seeming to have given a complete (and a nonhistorical) account of the work of art. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 675

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that omitting the extrinsic move is itself ideological resonates directly with Adorno’s critique of immanence and Benjamin’s insistence on the social ground of art — exactly the lineage being traced. — connects to: Refusal to take a stance on one’s identity is itself a stance. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1238; Deciding that something is unpolitical is itself a political act. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 1088; Ideological analysis targets significant absences and unspoken presumptions, not visible bias
• SEED: An essay angle: the limits of ‘close reading’ as covert ideology — how New Criticism’s self-contained medium is a repression of history, and what that implies for contemporary craft-first literary criticism.

Broader Connections

• Refusal to take a stance on one’s identity is itself a stance. #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1238
• Deciding that something is unpolitical is itself a political act. #corroborates (0.85) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1088
• Ideological analysis targets significant absences and unspoken presumptions, not visible bias #corroborates (0.80)