A class adopts heroic imagery only when it turns to aggressive confrontation

Evidence

Yet Plekhanov’s analysis is a shrewd one, and—using a model not unlike that of Bénichou for Jansenism—regrounds what is now an essentially stylistic phenomenon in the concrete situation of class antagonism: “bourgeois drama,” he tells us, “was born of the opposition temper of the French bourgeoisie and was no longer of any use in expressing its revolutionary aspirations.” The drame bourgeois, in other words, helped the middle classes to an awareness of themselves as a class distinct from the others, a class with its own life-style, ideology, and self-respect; yet when that class felt strong enough to enter in direct and aggressive confrontation with the nobility, it needed to draw on the more stimulating images of the Roman Republic, of Brutus and the great tribunes, of the heroic gestures of classical antiquity. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 745

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from self-differentiation to aggressive confrontation parallels the dialectic of Lukács’s class consciousness and Adorno on the revolutionary image; also echoes Benjamin’s theses on history. — connects to: A rising class abandons realistic art for heroic styles as it nears confrontation — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 745; A group imagining actions shifts from spectator to potential doer — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 326; Oppressors only experience class unity as a feared object when the oppressed revolt — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1042

Broader Connections

• A group imagining actions shifts from spectator to potential doer #expands (0.75) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 326
• Oppressors only experience class unity as a feared object when the oppressed revolt #expands (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1042