Class mediates between subjective and objective languages of historical description.

Evidence

This is to say that Marxism, owing to the peculiar reality of its object of study, has at its disposal two alternate languages (or codes, to use the structuralist term) in which any given phenomenon can be described. Thus history can be written either subjectively, as the history of class struggle, or objectively, as the development of the economic modes of production and their evolution from their own internal contradictions: these two formulae are the same, and any statement in one can without loss of meaning be translated into the other. The notion of class is problematical precisely because it is the mediator between these two different notational systems; for class is population articulated according to economic function, but it is also that which permits us to translate data about machinery and the operations of production back into human and interpersonal terms. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 578

Categorization

• XREF: The two-codes/translatability claim is precisely the dialectical ‘mediation’ method Jameson inherits from Frankfurt School — connects to Adorno’s writing in two languages and to the mediation discussion likely earlier in this chapter. — connects to: Genre judgments about class nature require historical specification; Social historians reconceived class as crafted relations rather than a structural given; Objective and subjective culture are distinct measurable phenomena — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 564 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Defines class as the mediating concept between subjective (class struggle) and objective (modes of production) historical codes.

Broader Connections

• A class’s historical fate registers as an internal felt mood rather than external data #exemplifies (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 743
• Genre judgments about class nature require historical specification #qualifies (0.82)
• Ideology maps the individual subject onto total class structures. #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 890
• Social historians reconceived class as crafted relations rather than a structural given #expands (0.75)
• Objective and subjective culture are distinct measurable phenomena #corroborates (0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 564