Representational media blur dialectical method by sliding form into content

Evidence

THE IDEAL material for a full-scale demonstration of such historical models would no doubt be drawn from spheres as distant from everyday life as possible: non-Euclidean geometry, for example, or the various logical worlds of science fiction, in which our own universe is reduplicated at an experimental level. Illustrations derived from the history of the visual arts or from the development of mathematics are thus more useful for our purposes than the more representational modes of literature or philosophy. For in dialectical treatments of the latter, there tends to take place a kind of slippage from form into content which cannot but blur the methodological points to be made. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 46

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is a striking methodological preference for science fiction and geometry over literature — worth tracing how Jameson’s later SFF criticism (Archaeologies of the Future) enacts exactly this program.
• XREF: connects to: Time-space compression from flexible accumulation generates a crisis of representation in cultural forms — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2035; Media juxtaposition conceals the dialectical links between seemingly unrelated events — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 797; Segmented contemporary artwork pieces do not demystify one another

Broader Connections

• Media juxtaposition conceals the dialectical links between seemingly unrelated events #expands (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 797
• Time-space compression from flexible accumulation generates a crisis of representation in cultural forms #expands (0.80) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 2035
• Segmented contemporary artwork pieces do not demystify one another #exemplifies (0.72)