Group categories are anthropomorphic while class categories remain material and impure

Evidence

Group representation is above all anthropomorphic and, unlike representation in terms of social classes, gives us to understand the social world as divided up and colonized down to the last segment by its collective actors and allegorical representatives, betokening a real world “as full as an egg,” as Sartre used to say, and as human as Utopia (or as that “pure poetry” in which none of the remnants of matter or contingency slosh around in the bottom like dregs or stick out like sore thumbs — the plays of Racine, the novels of Henry James). Class categories are more material, more impure and scandalously mixed, in the way in which their determinants or definitional factors involve the production of objects and the relations determined by that, along with the forces of the respective machinery: we can thus see down through class categories to the rocky bottom of the stream. Meanwhile, classes are too large to figure as Utopias, as options you choose and identify with in phantasmatic ways. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 746

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the analytical categories of groups vs. classes by their representational character — anthropomorphic vs. material.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s cognitive mapping project — the choice of representational category shapes the map itself.