Perception of art

Jameson relates the bourgeois attitude toward art as separate from social reality directly to the ideology of bourgeois individualism.

This ideology leads to the perception that private life is sharply distinguished from the public world of politics in a way that parallels the bourgeois tendency to treat art as a self-enclosed realm separate from the social and political world. But this perception of art does not elevate it as somehow superior to everyday reality; instead it merely renders art irrelevant, diminishing its function in life. Similarly Jameson insists that the ostensible privileging of the private over the public that is central to bourgeois individualism actually impoverishes private life by obscuring the domination of the individual by capitalism and creating a false illusion of individual autonomy.

Far from creating the strong, independent individuals mythologized by bourgeois ideology, capitalism "maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking".

See Metabole