The concrete enables one reality to be translated into multiple codes and dimensions

Evidence

From our present methodological point of view, however, this description may serve to illustrate that moment which mediates between literary criticism and sociology, in which the former begins to pass over insensibly into the latter under its own momentum: for the key terms of such a description—totality and individuality—are common both to the analysis of concrete social life and to that of the work of art, so that with a slight enlargement of the historical focus what seemed a statement about the work of art proves to retain its validity in the social and historical dimension. What is implied here, in other words, is the notion that at a certain level of concreteness the thing itself—or what we will later call its existential reality—may be formulated in any one of a number of alternate codes, may be rearticulated in any one of a number of different dimensions: as literary structure, as the lived truth of a determinate social organization, as a certain type of subject-object relationship, as a certain distance of language from its object, as a determinate mode of specialization or of the division of labor, as an implied relationship between classes. This is truly the place of the concrete, in which alone we may mediate between one level and another of reality, and translate technical analysis of the idea into its truth in the lived reality of social history. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 698

Categorization

• XREF: This is the mediation concept Jameson inherits from the Frankfurt School on the way to the fuller treatment of mediation in The Political Unconscious; also echoes Lukács’s insistence on totality as the dialectical category. — connects to: Reaching the concrete in thought requires successive abstractions that add conditions of existence.; One reality supports many independent scientific viewpoints of it — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 207; The logic of mapping the world is structurally inexhaustible expansion — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 475 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Jameson explicitly defines the place of the concrete and its mediating function between levels of reality.

Broader Connections

• One reality supports many independent scientific viewpoints of it #exemplifies (0.88) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 207
• Reaching the concrete in thought requires successive abstractions that add conditions of existence. #expands (0.78)
• Abstraction is the essential instrument for revealing structures invisible to direct observation #expands (0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 199
• The logic of mapping the world is structurally inexhaustible expansion #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 475