The work’s surface is structurally mystifying, not merely misleading

Evidence

If this suggests something of the way in which a Marxist criticism would reconstruct the inner form of a literary work, as both disguise and revelation of the concrete, it remains for us to say a word about the implications of such a theory for judgment or literary evaluations as they are currently practiced. For to claim that the task of the critic is to reveal this censored dimension of the work implies precisely that, at least in art as it is practiced today, in the society in which it is practiced, the surface of the work is a kind of mystification in its structure. This is the point, in other words, at which a Marxist criticism must once again come to terms with modernism in the arts, and I have already implied that the antimodernism of a Lukács (and of the more traditional Soviet critics) is at least partly a matter of taste and of cultural conditioning. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 785

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Marxist-critical task as revealing the censored dimension of the work — where disguise and revelation coincide.
• XREF: Directly engages the Lukács antimodernism debate the reader wants tracked; Jameson reframes it as partly taste and cultural conditioning rather than sheer principle. — connects to: The image is constituted by a nihilating structure, not by revived perception — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 230

Broader Connections

• The image is constituted by a nihilating structure, not by revived perception #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 230