Dialectical thinking generates its categories from the content’s own inner logic.
Evidence
The most striking model of the way in which content, through its own inner logic, generates those categories in terms of which it organizes itself in a formal structure, and in terms of which it is therefore best studied, is perhaps that furnished us by Marx’s economic research, where he was obliged at one and the same time to invent the appropriate categories of investigation and to justify such categories on historical grounds. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 681
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the dialectical ideal of categories arising immanently from content rather than being imposed from without.
- XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt-School motif of immanent critique versus external formalism — the same categorical imperative Jameson carries from Adorno. — connects to: Dialectical criticism lets each work dictate its own interpretive categories — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 678; Dialectical progression proceeds by leaps between unrelated materials; The work’s autonomy is itself a dialectical, historically variable phenomenon — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 646
Broader Connections
- Dialectical criticism lets each work dictate its own interpretive categories
#corroborates(0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 678 - Dialectical progression proceeds by leaps between unrelated materials
#contradicts(0.80)