Conceptualizing a mode of production requires coexisting distinct production systems

Evidence

The unevenness that allowed French thinkers (Turgot, but also Rousseau himself!) to conceptualize a “mode of production” probably had as much as anything else to do with the prerevolutionary situation in the France of that period in which feudal forms stood out ever more starkly in their distinctive difference against a whole, newly emergent bourgeois culture and class consciousness. Scotland is in many ways a more complex and interesting case, for, last of the emergent First World countries, or first of the Third World ones (to use Tom Nairn provocative idea in The Break-up of Britain), Enlightenment Scotland was above all the space of a coexistence of radically distinct zones of production and culture: the archaic economy of the Highlanders and their clan system, the commercial vigor of the English “partner” over the border, on the eve of its industrial “takeoff.” The brillance of Edinburgh was therefore not a matter of Gaelic genetic material but rather owing to the strategic yet ec-centric position of the Scottish metropolis and intellectuals with respect to this virtually synchronic coexistence of distinct modes of production, which it was uniquely the task of the Scottish Enlightenment to “think,” or to conceptualize. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 864

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in periodization and what conditions make seeing one’s own economic system possible — a precondition for any cognitive map.
• SEED: The ‘strategic eccentricity’ idea — that you can only see a system from its edge — could anchor an essay on what position lets contemporary people perceive late capitalism.