Dialectical criticism translates between formal and content-related terminology

Evidence

This is, I believe, the “materialistic kernal” of Schiller’s remark, which serves as the epigraph of this section: “As far as I am concerned, I am convinced that beauty is only the form of a form, and that what is ordinarily called its content must necessarily be thought of as content already formed.” Indeed, the first methodological consequence of the dialectical notion of form and content is that, depending on the progress of the interpretive work and the stage at which it has arrived, either term can be translated into the other: thus every layer of content proves, as Schiller implies, to the but a form in disguise. But we have seen above that it is just as true to say that form is really only the projection of content and of the inner logic of the latter. In fact, this essential distinction is useful only on condition that it ultimately re-abolish itself in the ambiguity of the artistic substance itself, which can be seen alternately as either all content or all form. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 769 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

WHAT WE have examined above in terms of a temporal or diachronic sequence, we might also have expressed as a contradiction between a form and its content: for the new is to the old as latent content working its way to the surface to displace a form henceforth obsolete. This distinction, in which, among other things, the reader will recognize Marx’s model of revolutionary change, is no doubt the central operative mechanism of both the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, and in the long run the most momentous of Hegel’s conceptual innovations. For the new opposition is to be sharply distinguished from that older idea of form which dominates philosophical thinking from Aristotle to Kant and for which the conjugate term is not content but matter, inert materials, filling, the passive. Nor is the new Hegelian duality to be seen as simply one more version of the more primal dialectical reality of the relationship between subject and object. Rather, the distinction between form and content is precisely that which lends the notion of a subject-object relationship its secret dynamics, which permits Hegel to see the various logical combinations of the latter as an emergence, as a generation out of each other, and which permits him to construct a ladder of forms out of what would remain at any point a simple empirical measurement of an existing ratio of forces. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 670 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Form and content are mutually translatable terms in dialectical criticism — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 769; The form-content distinction is the central operative mechanism of dialectical thinking — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 670; Dialectical criticism of superstructures shifts from causal point-field analysis to homology between two continua — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 44

Broader Connections

• Form and content are mutually translatable terms in dialectical criticism #corroborates (0.95) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 769
• The form-content distinction is the central operative mechanism of dialectical thinking #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 670