Hyper-specific description paradoxically produces the most general imagery

Evidence

Indeed, the very complexity of the attribute (“des cernes plus fonces, traces aux contours arrondis, franges de minuscules festons”), clearly designed to supply the maximum specificity to this object, as if uniqueness were a function of multiplicity, only anticipates the dialectic to come: for these abstract plurals — Robbe-Grillet at his most formalizing — end up evoking any surface at all that has some grain to it; the most concrete turns into the most general under our very eyes; plurality turns out to stand on the side of the universal rather than the particular. But finally — “you cannot get out of language by means of language!” — all the possibilities end up at the same dead end: a single attribute for the box (“brown,” “cardboard”) would not have done us much more good than some more obviously accidental property (a “rip” or “tear,” for example), insofar as all those words also remain general in their very essence. Only the definite article (the box, as though there could never be another one) and the present tense try to reanchor these not very satisfactory nouns and adjectives into their proper place in the “text,” which is to say this printed novel here, to be read according to generic specifications. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 333

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates how the concrete/universal dialectic operates — a mechanism central to understanding the period-specific aesthetic.