The society of abundance has lost all experience of the negative

Evidence

It seems to me, however, that the problem is most usefully posed the other way round, and that the thrust and persuasiveness, the basic unity, of Marcuse’s work can best be felt if we reverse these conceptual priorities and take as his basic theme not happiness, but rather the nature of the negative itself. Indeed, what his discussion of Freud’s instinctual dynamics has in common with his sociological doctrine, as it emerges from Marx, as well as with his tactical positions expressed in Repressive Tolerance and An Essay on Liberation, is the notion that the consumer’s society, the society of abundance, has lost the experience of the negative in all its forms, that it is the negative alone which is ultimately fructifying from a cultural as well as an individual point of view, that a genuinely human existence can only be achieved through the process of negation. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 218

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘negative’ as central organizing concept connects to Adorno’s negative dialectic and the Frankfurt School notion of negation as the motor of critique — exactly the lineage this reader is tracing. — connects to: Postmodern society has eliminated the old types of solitude for rich and poor alike — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 698

Broader Connections

• Postmodern society has eliminated the old types of solitude for rich and poor alike #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 698