Gossip is a distorted figure of a future passion for human particularity

Evidence

In this sense it is perhaps not too much to say that gossip—that meeting place of conversation and art, that profoundly fertile vice of both Saint-Simon and Proust (and indeed of Balzac as well, in a very different social milieu)—may itself stand as a kind of distorted figure of that passion for the human in its smallest details which will be ours in the transfigured society and the transfigured world. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 296

Categorization

• XREF: Chimes with Adorno’s insistence that the universal is only accessible through the most particular concrete detail; also quasi-Benjaminian in treating an apparently trivial vice as utopian cipher. — connects to: Gossip improves the accuracy of social impressions by widening information samples. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 828; Moral gossip targets more than fairness, tracking loyalty and norm adherence too. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 436

Broader Connections

• Gossip improves the accuracy of social impressions by widening information samples. #contradicts (0.85) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 828
• Moral gossip targets more than fairness, tracking loyalty and norm adherence too. #expands (0.75) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 436