Social class fuses both serial and group structures simultaneously

Evidence

For the ideal groups we have been considering up to now are as abstract as the isolated individuals with which we began (“there are revolutionary idylls about the group which are the collective counterpart of the Robinsonade” [p. 643]). When, however, we attain the concrete reality of social class as such, we find that it is a complex of both serial and group structures: on the one hand, class is serial, both to the degree that it can never completely be transformed into a group, and in the sense that it originates as a serial structure: “it is qualified and determined by exigencies of the practico-inert: the first, negative relationship of the worker to the machine (nonpossession), the mystification of the free contract and work becoming a force hostile to the worker himself, beginning with the salary system and the capitalist process—all these things are realized in the context of serial dispersion and antagonistic reciprocity on the work market” (p. 644). Class affiliation, in other words, is defined as a particular relationship to a particular, determinate mode of economic production; and in this sense, what Sartre describes as seriality is what Marx calls conditioning (we will examine the possible differences between these two models shortly). … From a different point of view, however, the “whole class is present in the organized group which springs into being within it and its collective seriality is, as a limitation, the inorganic being of its practical community” (p. 644): so that the group can, at least symbolically, realize the union of the entire class in its action. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 558

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson maps Sartre’s seriality onto Marx’s conditioning, giving a precise dialectical definition of class as simultaneously serial and grouped.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Frankfurt-School lineage project: this is Sartre’s version of mediation between base (practico-inert) and cultural/social forms, echoing Lukacs’s totality. — connects to: Instrumentarian sociality creates new stratification instead of dissolving class divisions — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1428; Class difference persists even as class consciousness converges — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 193; Working-class Swiss shared middle-class character structures despite economic differences — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 565 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Instrumentarian sociality creates new stratification instead of dissolving class divisions #complicates (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1428
• Working-class Swiss shared middle-class character structures despite economic differences #exemplifies (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 565
• Class difference persists even as class consciousness converges #complicates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 193