A class’s historical fate registers as an internal felt mood rather than external data

Evidence

This temporal destiny of a class is, however, measured not so much from without, on some external graph or chart of the overall course of economic history, as rather from within, in a kind of rising or falling internal temperature, as a confident feeling of open possibilities and of riding with the flood tide of historical opportunity or a kind of morose turning back upon the self, a sense of stagnation and futility, of the closing of doors, of deteriorating talents and wasted energies. This altered mood of a class as it passes from the great days of its rise to those of its decline Marxism now characterizes by the well-known political language of progressive or reactionary. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 743

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘internal temperature’ of a class prefigures Jameson’s later notion of the political unconscious and connects to Benjamin’s auratic, mood-based historiography. — connects to: Class mediates between subjective and objective languages of historical description. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 578; Class position includes a temporal trajectory alongside its antagonistic relation to other classes — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 743; Class consciousness operates as an internal map locating each individual relative to other classes — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 760 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Class consciousness operates as an internal map locating each individual relative to other classes #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 760
• Subjectivity is formed not by single moments but by accumulated historical sedimentation #corroborates (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 307
• Spontaneity marks subaltern classes that lack class-for-itself consciousness #expands (0.72) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 803
• One’s class origins enable unique insight while also limiting what the mind can see #complicates (0.70)