"A further point is that, little by little, in the current universe, everything is slowly being named; nor does this have anything to do with the older Aristotelian universals in which the idea of a chair subsumes all its individual manifestations"
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Jameson is describing a world where language doesn’t merely reflect reality; it colonizes it. “Little by little” is the tell: this isn’t a dramatic seizure of meaning but a bureaucratic, market-driven drip. Everything gets a label, a category, a tag - and once it’s tagged, it’s easier to sort, sell, surveil, and think you’ve understood. The menace is the quiet normality of it, the way naming arrives as convenience while functioning as control.
The swipe at “older Aristotelian universals” matters because Jameson wants to cut off the comforting philosophical alibi: this isn’t the classical problem of how a concept like “chair” gathers many chairs under one idea. In Aristotle, universals are meant to clarify how knowledge works. In Jameson’s “current universe,” naming is less about grasping essence than producing administrable units. The chair isn’t an instance of a shared form; it’s an entry in a system: SKU, style, aesthetic, lifestyle signal, searchable term. The universal has been replaced by the index.
Subtext: late capitalism doesn’t just manufacture goods; it manufactures legibility. To be “named” is to be made available to systems of exchange and interpretation that feel neutral but aren’t. Jameson’s context - poststructuralism’s suspicion of stable meanings, plus his own Marxist attention to commodification - sharpens the point. Naming is not an innocent act of description. It’s a historical process that expands the grid of what can be recognized, circulated, and managed, until the unnamed (the unclassifiable, the resistant) becomes increasingly hard to inhabit.
The swipe at “older Aristotelian universals” matters because Jameson wants to cut off the comforting philosophical alibi: this isn’t the classical problem of how a concept like “chair” gathers many chairs under one idea. In Aristotle, universals are meant to clarify how knowledge works. In Jameson’s “current universe,” naming is less about grasping essence than producing administrable units. The chair isn’t an instance of a shared form; it’s an entry in a system: SKU, style, aesthetic, lifestyle signal, searchable term. The universal has been replaced by the index.
Subtext: late capitalism doesn’t just manufacture goods; it manufactures legibility. To be “named” is to be made available to systems of exchange and interpretation that feel neutral but aren’t. Jameson’s context - poststructuralism’s suspicion of stable meanings, plus his own Marxist attention to commodification - sharpens the point. Naming is not an innocent act of description. It’s a historical process that expands the grid of what can be recognized, circulated, and managed, until the unnamed (the unclassifiable, the resistant) becomes increasingly hard to inhabit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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