The homogeneous unified class may be a retrospective fiction of Western self-narrative

Evidence

It is a moot point by anybody who takes this argument directly on the pulses, as to whether they ever functioned in that way. Perhaps they never functioned in that way. This may be, indeed, what the narrative of the West is like: the notion that we told of the story we told ourselves, about their functioning in that way. We know that the great homogenous function of the collective social class is extremely difficult for any good historian to actually lay his or her finger on. It keeps disappearing just over the horizon, like the organic community. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 194

Categorization

• XREF: Critical for the Islamophobia field: the construction of a monolithic ‘West’ and a monolithic ‘Other’ are both narrative inventions in the same retroactive mode Hall describes here. — connects to: Western myth and epic are structured by linear filiation toward a projected end — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 279