The modernist classics became reified monuments that paralyzed fresh form production.

Evidence

But now I want to restrict this account once again, so that it can be understood more specifically in relationship to modernism itself, and what Postmodernism meant “originally,” when it freed itself from this last. I want to argue that the “great modernist works” in effect became reified in this sense, and not only by becoming school classics. Their distance from their readers as monuments and as the efforts of “genius” tended also to paralyze form production in general, to endow the practice of all the high-cultural arts with an alienating specialist or expert qualification that blocked the creative mind with awkward selfconsciousness and intimidated fresh production in a profoundly modernist and self-validating way. It was only after Picasso that Picasso’s remarkably unselfconscious improvisations became stamped as unique activities of modernist style and genius inaccessible to other people. Most of the modernist “classics,” however, wanted to stand as figures for the unblocking of human energy; the contradiction of modernism lay in the way in which that universal value of human production could achieve figuration only by way of the unique and restricted signature of the modernist seer or prophet, thus slowly canceling itself out again for all but the disciples. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 691

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the internal contradiction of modernism: universal liberation could only be figured through the unique signature of the individual genius, which re-cancels the universal value.
• XREF: The paradox that a movement aiming to unblock creative energy only achieves it through a restricted signature recalls Weber’s iron cage of rationalization. — connects to: Popularized classics lose the estrangement that constituted their truth. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 301; Attempted revivals of past traditions accelerate their decay — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1454