Style is the constrained field of choices available to makers.

Evidence

Leonard Meyer explores style as defined by the set of constraints within which a choice can be made. Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Karl Marx writes: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1869 ), chap. 1, trans. Saul K. Padover, available at marxists.org. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 389

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the definition of style the book builds on — constraints, not free expression.
• XREF: The Marx citation grounds the book’s determinist frame — style made under given material conditions, echoing Jameson’s ‘always historicize’.