The problem of mediation links psychological, social, and economic levels
Evidence
But essentially the value of Sartre’s book for a dialectical literary criticism lies in the way it poses the problem—vital for any Marxist theory—of mediation: How do we pass, in other words, from one level of social life to another, from the psychological to the social, indeed, from the social to the economic? What is the relationship of ideology, not to mention the work of art itself, to the more fundamental social and historical reality of groups in conflict, and how must the latter be understood if we are to be able to see cultural objects as social acts, at once disguised and transparent? — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 20
Categorization
- DEFINE: Jameson’s definition of mediation — the central concept of his whole critical method — as the passage between levels of social life, is stated here most compactly.
- XREF: This is the exact mechanism Jameson calls ‘transcoding’ in The Political Unconscious, and it is the Frankfurt-School answer to how culture relates to base. — connects to: Extended sociological study converts causality into homology and parallelism; Marxism itself varies by the socio-economic system it reflects — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 27; Immediacy prioritizes circulation while mediation produces relations and difference — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 373 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Immediacy prioritizes circulation while mediation produces relations and difference
#expands(0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 373 - Social relations are constituted through mediating processes
#expands(0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 667 - Mediation makes latent distance between parties explicit and measurable
#expands(0.70) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3841 - Mediation means recommitting to symbolic, organizational, and synthesizing forms against immediacy.
#expands(0.70) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 46