The twenties-thirties antithesis gets reified into image and symbolically reinvents the bourgeoisie

Evidence

I have elsewhere tried to identify the privileged raw material or historical content of this particular operation of reification and of the transformation into the image in the crucial antithesis between the twenties and the thirties, and in the historicist revival of the very stylistic expression of that antithesis in art deco. The symbolic working out of that tension — as it were, between Aristocracy and Worker — evidently involves something like the symbolic reinvention or production of a new Bourgeoisie, a new form of identity. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 627

Categorization

• XREF: Art deco as the frozen stylistic trace of a class tension (Aristocracy vs Worker) is a concrete periodization claim — a test case for the cultural-dominant thesis’s falsifiability. — connects to: The aestheticized self belongs historically to bourgeois private life — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 213; The 1930s offered a visibly stark class antagonism that postindustrial capitalism obscures — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 24; The modern cult of creative genius was invented to legitimize bourgeois distinction — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 436 (+1 more)
• STORYSTEM: The idea that an aesthetic style registers a buried class dialectic ‘as it were, between Aristocracy and Worker’ could seed a period fiction built around art deco design and its suppressed social content.