Surrealist theory stays actual while its practice grew historically obsolete

Evidence

Is this to say that Surrealism, as a theory and a practice, retains for us the burning actuality which it had in its own day? The answer is contained in the question: for the theory remains actual while the practice has ceased to be so. The reasons for this lie not only in that inner contradiction between the text and the idea described above; they are also profoundly rooted in historical conditions themselves, and may perhaps best be grasped by a return to the kind and nature of the imagery that we associate with Surrealism—not, indeed, the images so much as the objects themselves, the mysterious pieces of junk, inexplicable artifacts which seem to bear some hidden message, the lettering that leaps out from a shop window in passing as a miraculous coincidence or a thinly disguised omen, the grade-B melodramas in cheap movie theaters, the store windows of inner passageways, now long since torn down, flora and fauna of the city, whose emblematic value is underlined by their presence as photographs, bound into the text of the books themselves, as though it were necessary for them to come before the reader with an extra-verbal density, a tangible reality-quotient which alone lends them the opacity of the dream object and permits them to resist the verbal thinness and impoverishment of the dream protocol. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 207

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which historical conditions specifically invalidated Surrealist practice? Jameson gestures at them here — worth chasing where he unfolds that argument.
• XREF: The separation of theory from practice (‘inner contradiction between the text and the idea’) prefigures Jameson’s later treatment of Adorno and the fate of aesthetic practice under late capitalism. — connects to: Theory survives new cultural phenomena when treated as an open horizon — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 728; Past philosophical systems remain historically valid even after being superseded

Broader Connections

• Theory survives new cultural phenomena when treated as an open horizon #expands (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 728
• Past philosophical systems remain historically valid even after being superseded #corroborates (0.72)