By Timothy Bewes

Of the entire thoughts that have emerged to explain the consequences of capitalism at the human global, none is extra photo or simply grasped than “reification”—the strategy through which women and men are become items, issues. bobbing up out of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, the idea that of reification bargains an unrivalled instrument with which to give an explanation for the true results of the facility of capital on recognition itself.

Symptoms of reification are proliferating round us—from the branding of products and companies to racial and sexual stereotypes, all sorts of spiritual religion, the expansion of nationalism, and up to date techniques like “spin” and “globalization.” At this sort of time, the time period should take pleasure in higher severe forex than ever. fresh thinkers, notwithstanding, have expressed deep reservations in regards to the proposal, and the time period has turn into marginalized within the humanities and social societies.

Eschewing this pattern, Timothy Bewes opens up a brand new formula of the concept that, claiming that, within the hugely reflective age of “late capitalism,” reification is healthier understood as a sort of social and cultural anxiety: extra, that such an figuring out returns the concept that to its origins within the paintings of Georg Lukács. Drawing upon writers together with Kierkegaard, Herman Melville, Proust and Flannery O’Connor, he outlines a idea of reification which can provide to unite politics with fact, paintings with adventure, and philosophy with genuine existence.

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The figural (or MARXISM AND THE HIDDEN GOD 57 dialectical) elaboration of such images consists of wresling them out of the archaic domain of empirical history, charging them 'to the bursting point with time', and thereby annihilating what Benjamin calls the intentio - the immediate historical context which is more properly the concern of the human sciences. This explosive moment is simultaneously the 'birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth'. Thus, in Benjamin's idea of the dialectical image, at least, the afiìrmation of transcendence - of another world which is present at every moment in this one - is a central, ineluctable motif, inseparable from the task of intervening in this world.

The painting depicts people known to Spencer during his life - including the artist himself and several 44 REIFICÂTION, OR THE ÂNXIETY OF LATE CAPITALISM members of his family - physically arising from their graves in the parish cemetery. w - a disjunction punctuated by its inadequacy, by its actualiry as the product of worldly logic - is given imaginative form. In Christian art, the same disjunction attains a sensuous form. Christianity and art have an almost symbiotic relationship, as thinkers including Hegel, Freud, Adorno and Georg Simmel have srrongly intuited.

Ia In The Modern Prince,,tntonio Gramsci founds his idea of the revolutionary parfy on a similarþ paradoxical conception of the agency of historical change. 15 In Machiavellit final invocation of a prince (nominally Lorenzo de Medici) who 'really exists', therefore, occurs a 67 WHÂT IS IMPUTED CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS? synthesis of the ideal and the material, comparable to that which occurs in the Christian íncarnation, or in the celebration of the Eucharist - or in the role of the parry as Gramsci develops it by anùogy'.

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Reification: or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism by Timothy Bewes
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