Demography constitutes a new form of materialism beyond body or individual

Evidence

Such an existential hypothesis would go a long way toward documenting the status of demography as materialism, indeed as a new kind or dimension of materialism: neither that of the individual body (as in bourgeois mechanical materialism or positivism), for multiplied bodies, although they do not fuse together into some monstrous physical collective oversoul, reduce the precious individual corporality to something trivially biological or evolutionary; nor that of Marx’s “real, concrete individuals” (those from whom in The German Ideology “we” famously “set out”), since they are still redolent of personal identities and names, and even workers in the mass do not seem demographic enough, threatening to lead on or lapse back into “humanism.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 765

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes demographic materialism from both bourgeois mechanical materialism and Marx’s concrete individuals.
• XREF: Ties to the reader’s goal of a cognitive map and to Jameson’s broader project of reworking the base/superstructure relation.