Marxian mediation is material, not merely conceptual or ideal

Evidence

When Karl Marx initiated his radical break with the history of philosophy, he did so in large part by criticizing Hegel on Hegel’s own terms. To take relationality as primary must mean, he argued, not just an abstraction, but rather an obligation to inquire into and acknowledge the very fabric of relations that make philosophy possible: the social structure that allots food, shelter, and time for literacy and speculation. Mediation is not just an ideal process in the realm of ideas (we require categories of time and space to think) but a material process in the realm of corporeality and social interdependence (we tarry with nature to make our conditions of existence; our social relations are contingent rather than fixed). — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 254

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to judging Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson; also links her definition of mediation to the later ‘Antitheory’ chapter fight.
• DEFINE: Establishes the materialist definition of mediation that the reader will need to distinguish immediacy against.