Technological determinism substitutes for Marxist historiography by omitting class

Evidence

Yet in these late essays on modern literature a new pre-occupation appears, which signals Benjamin’s passage from the predominantly aesthetic to the historical and political dimension. This is the attention to the machine and to mechanical inventions, which characteristically first appears in the realm of aesthetics itself in the study of the movies (“The Reproducible Work of Art”) and is only later extended to the study of history in general (as in the essay “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in which the feeling of life in this period is conveyed by a description of the new objects and inventions characteristic of it: the commercial passageways, the use of cast iron, the Daguerreotype and the panorama, the great expositions, advertising). Yet it is important to point out that however materialistic such an approach to history may seem, nothing is farther from Marxism than the stress on invention and technique as the primary cause of historical change. Indeed, it seems to me that such theories (of the kind which regard the steam engine as the cause of the Industrial Revolution, and which have recently been rehearsed yet again, in streamlined modernistic form, in the works of Marshall McLuhan) function as a substitute for Marxist historiography in the way they offer a feeling of concreteness comparable to economic subject matter, at the same time that they dispense with any consideration of the human factors of classes and of the social organization of production. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 161

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s dialectical-criticism goal: Jameson is drawing the orthodox Marxist line against technological determinism, a position shared with Adorno’s critiques of both McLuhan and positivist historiography. — connects to: Marxist judgment of modernism presupposes a personal agency that historical determinism denies — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 398; The Second International enshrined reductive economic determinism as official Marxism; Historical specificity distinguishes Marx’s materialism from vulgar or technological determinism — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 881 (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Benjamin’s ‘materialist’ machine/invention historiography avoid the technological-determinist trap Jameson warns against here — via what mediating mechanism?
• SEED: Article angle: the persistent appeal of McLuhan-style technological determinism as a ‘feel-good concreteness’ substitute for serious class analysis — why pseudo-materialism keeps out-selling real materialism.

Broader Connections

• Technology’s cultural effects are mediated by late capitalism not deterministically #corroborates (0.85) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 410
• Historical specificity distinguishes Marx’s materialism from vulgar or technological determinism #corroborates (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 881
• Marxist judgment of modernism presupposes a personal agency that historical determinism denies #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 398
• Marx overemphasized economics while neglecting power and technical detail #corroborates (0.75) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2847
• The Second International enshrined reductive economic determinism as official Marxism #corroborates (0.70)
• Technological determinism is a fiction; context shapes technology use #corroborates (0.70) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 59
• Marxist theory requires holding both relative autonomy and economic determinacy at once #qualifies (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 371