Sartre’s method substitutes lived experience, historical time-lag, and the project for logical class equations

Evidence

The “method” of Sartre will therefore here take the form of a rectification of this idealistic pseudo-Marxism, and it seems to me that this rectification basically takes three forms: first, in objecting to the simple intellectual equation between an existence and an abstract idea, it tries to substitute for that intellectual link a genuinely lived one. That is, for Sartre, the problem of mediation is also the problem of character formation, of social influence, of genuine lived experience of class and society. Second, it attempts to plunge this problem back into history by showing that there is nothing timeless about it, and that in social and individual life we are constantly faced with overlap and time lag, with the coexistence of hosts of different time schemes at the same moment. And finally, it replaces the relationship between idea and human existence (which in pseudo-Marxism had been a purely logical one: the idea is the universal, the man the particular of it), with a dynamic one, namely that of existence as project, and of class relationship and affiliation as the free invention of a role projected toward the future, rather than determined by the past. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 437

Categorization

• XREF: The three-part rectification — lived mediation, historical time-lag, existence-as-project — maps onto the reader’s interest in how Jameson’s dialectical criticism modifies Lukács’s totality through Sartrean existentialism. — connects to: Optimization models predict steady states but carry no historical dimension — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 105
• DEFINE: Defines mediation as character formation and lived experience rather than an intellectual equation — the methodological heart of Sartre’s (and implicitly Jameson’s) dialectic.