Depoliticized periods follow economic rhythms the way hunger follows the business cycle

Evidence

What is sometimes characterized as a nostalgia for class politics of some older type is generally more likely to be simply a “nostalgia” for politics tout court: given the way in which periods of intense politization and subsequent periods of depolitization and withdrawal are modeled on the great economic rhythms of the boom and bust of the business cycle, to describe this feeling as “nostalgia” is about as adequate as to characterize the body’s hunger, before dinner, as a “nostalgia for food.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 714

Categorization

• XREF: The hunger-not-nostalgia analogy is a genuinely clarifying figure — could be used in the parody/pastiche explanatory project as an example of how Jameson deploys economic analogy to deflate psychological explanation. — connects to: Workers’ latent community hunger gets wasted by privatism. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 938