Class awareness dissolves when group corruption is framed as conspiracy, not class action.

Evidence

This lack of functionality in our picture of the social groups, along with the breakdown of their capacity to constitute a subject or an agency, means that we tend to dissociate the acknowledgment of the individual existence of a group (pluralism as a value) from any attribution of a project that becomes registered not as a group but as a conspiracy, and thereby falls to another, different slot in the representational apparatus, Reagan’s businessmen, for example, about whom by now just about virtually everybody is willing to admit the virtually immediate link between private gain and the most varied legislative program, are perceived -from that perspective — as a list of names in the newspaper, a local network of cronies that you could expand into a regional confraternity (southern California, the Sunbelt); what is most paradoxical, however, is the fact that thus perceived, they shed no discredit on business or businessmen at all. The taxonomy of groups is thus remarkably elastic ideologically and can differentiate in such a way as to preserve the innocence of the original collective, always provided that is secured from breaking that fundamental conceptual barrier or taboo which separates a group from a social class. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 751

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in cognitive mapping and ideology, and to Howie Becker’s moral-panic work on the elastic taxonomy of deviant groups. — connects to: Framing drove membership in an ascribed conspiratorial enemy, not behaviour or intent. — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 65
• SEED: Useful for an essay on how whistleblower/corruption scandals are narrated as conspiracy rather than structural class critique, preserving the innocence of the institution.