The subject’s unity is an effect of social configuration, not a premise

Evidence

We must deduce from this the necessity of reversing Kant’s transcendental deduction: it is not the unity of the world that demands to be posited on the basis of the unity of the transcendental subject; rather, the unity or incoherence and fragmentation of the subject — that is, the accessibility of a workable subject position or the absence of one — is itself a correlative of the unity or lack of unity of the outside world. The subject is certainly no mere “effect” of the object, but it would not be nearly so erroneous to suggest that the subject position is just such an effect. Meanwhile, it must be understood that what is meant by object here is not some mere perceptual aggregate of physical things, but a social configuration or ensemble of social relationships (even physical perception and seemingly rock-bottom experiences of the body and of matter being mediated by the social). What one concludes from such an argument is not that the “unified” subject is unreal or undesirable and inauthentic, but rather that it is dependent for its construction and existence on a certain kind of society and is menaced, undermined, problematized, or fragmented by other social arrangements. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 333

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts or re-situates Kant’s transcendental deduction; connects to structuralist/Foucauldian accounts of the subject’s social construction. Also bears on the reader’s aim of mapping their own position in the world system. — connects to: The We-subject experience is a subjective psychological event, not an ontological relation — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1035; Human deformation is a social product, not a damage to an underlying essence — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 939; We-subject feeling is a solipsistic illusion with no real social being (+6 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies subject position — the key concept for the reader’s cognitive-map goal.