More from Jameson's Marxism and Form:
“.. For Sartre orthodox Marxism practices a reduction of history and experience. This, although true, tends to prejudice the argument somewhat. For it may be maintained that in a sense all understanding, all abstract thought is reductive: indeed, the very process of abstraction itself is in its very essence a reduction, through which we substitute for the four dimensional density of reality itself simplified models, schematic abstract ideas, and thereby of necessity do violence to reality and to experience. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how we could understand or deal with reality other than by such reduction.
Insofar as existentialism is in its very origins a reaction against this process of abstraction, we must, we must also observe that it depends on it as a prior moment: no return to things, no return to lived experience, unless we have first abandoned them in the process of abstraction.”
Thus ‘lived experience’ – as dense, messy, vivid, and disordered - is apprehended as such only when measured against ‘abstraction,’ is thrown into relief only through and by ‘abstraction’ and therefore coloured by it in advance.
The flight into ‘lived experience’ as a reservoir of intensities and multiplicity of sensations has abstraction as its very condition of possibility, like the returning Dead who (speculates Berger) experience ‘life’ with a gratitude and sudden clarity unbeknown to the merely living.
"Lived experience" is of course itself a concept, which cannot have been simply and inertly present in lived experience, nor can the question of how we arrive at this concept be answered by lived experience.
Both these points, however, presumably render problematic the initial idea of abstract ideas, or the conceptual, ‘doing violence’ to ‘reality and experience’ since these are already leavened with the conceptual to begin with, and the very idea of them as some precious pre-conceptual grain of being is itself a conceptual product answering to certain demands within our life-world.
Needless to say, Jameson – and Sartre – know all this already, and the quotation above is little more than the preparatory work for its own surpassing