Commodity and Sublimity

Mimesis of the Immaterial

I. COMMODITY-FORM AND CULTURAL FORM: TOWARD A MATERIALIST LITERARY HISTORY

The sputtering of the global economy since the financial crisis of 2008 has coincided with the resurrection of fundamental theoretical categories, including "commodity" and "reification," not to mention "capitalism" itself. This chapter aims to provide a gloss on "commodity" and "reification," two key terms that together mediate material existence and cultural forms in modernity. The very fact that this exercise is required at this moment of widespread crisis is testimony to the deep erosion of the conceptual and practical bases for grasping epochal historical shifts in the wake of the neoliberalization of much of global society and culture over the past four decades. The consequences are most dire for imagining, let alone generating, transformative crises in response. Even the most astute Marxist critic of the American imperial epicenter, Fredric Jameson, affirmed late capitalist "postmodernism" as a "permanent because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive" state rather than "anything so silly as the ultimate senescence, breakdown, and death of the system as such." The fall from the indeterminate vagaries of a postmodern theoretical stratosphere to the hard objectivity of capitalism's terminal crisis — with all the threats it poses to human habitation on the planet — has been sharp. For those disoriented by this uncanny object-world — writhing under logics of scientific disenchantment yet "abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" attributable to nothing other than the worldly processes of capital self-valorization — the following is meant as a short guide. Those already familiar with the ramifications of generalized commodification and the socially necessary illusion that it inevitably secretes — something like objective hallucination on a systemic scale — should expect little more than a connecting of key dots. The conceptual picture that forms from such an exercise spells out distinct possibilities and challenges for grasping sublimity as a materially grounded phenomenon. Further, what would a materialist literary history seeking to give constellational form to metropolitan and colonial culture look like? What would be its theoretical ground and, moreover, its source of social critique?

Given how much Walter Benjamin sought to connect in nonreductive ways disparate relations between commodity-form and cultural form in his own crisis-ridden imperial-capitalist reality, his fragmentary works may serve as indices for fashioning a new literary history. The unfinished nature of his methodological reflections allows them to be reconfigured in other times and places with extraordinary potential. Stemming from the intellectual uncertainties that followed the destruction of World War I, Benjamin aimed increasingly at tracking the dialectic of material and immaterial "truth contents" in the wake of commodification. The particular representational form philosophical truth would need to adopt for the articulation of its fundamental insights was an ongoing concern of Benjamin's. "Darstellung ist der Inbegriff ihrer Methode" was his dictum for signifying that presentation becomes the inevitable incarnation of philosophical method. Such a formulation had obvious relevance to the representational form literary history would need to acquire in order to give embodiment to aesthetico-historical truth contents. The representational form was especially significant in this case, considering that for Benjamin aesthetic forms took the shape of hieroglyphs exceeding the bounds of contemporary intelligibility and thereby intimating possible futurities. The challenge of giving adequate shape to truth contents that nearly always burst through the material moments of signification was most acute for Benjamin in the wake of his engagement with Marxism. Over a series of theoretical fragments Benjamin explored the inherited disciplinary limits of literary-historical scholarship and the radical, messianic breaks implied by Lukács's widely influential and strikingly controversial History and Class Consciousness (Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, 1923), as well as Adorno's notion of "shrinkage" as "the entrance of truth-content into material content" (II: 292). In taking this course into the specificities of capitalist materiality, Benjamin aimed at formulating a program for literary study that would tie all truth claims to a commodity-ridden material world, including those involving revelation, divine power, or messianic time. The problematic that subsequently unfolds in his work is premised on "a detour through materialist aesthetics" and is invested in grasping the relations between commodity-form and cultural form (II: 415–16). In his dérive through "Central Park," which would take Benjamin ultimately to the Parisian arcades, where consumer society served the "reactivation of mythic powers," Benjamin begins to translate his conceptual vocabulary into the dynamics of commodification and reification: "The commodity has taken the place of the allegorical mode of apprehension" (IV: 188).

If so, what does the commodity-form signify from the mold left by allegory? How do metaphysical categories find peculiar resonance in the material structuration of capitalist society? What is it about the particular interpenetration of material and immaterial forms within commodities that allows them to take on a quasi-religious existence, even make capitalism into a religion? Benjamin's engagement with Marxism culminated in the experimental literary montage of the Arcades Project, with "Convolute X" devoted to Marx. Assuming what Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin describe as "epic proportions," the Arcades Project is littered with citations regarding processes of commodification and suggestive commentary on the dream world that takes shape with the generalization of commodity-based production. "Only a thoughtless observer," claims Benjamin, "can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology." The new phantasmagoria generated by consumerist capitalism reactivate quasi-timeless myth images, becoming the internal condition of possibility for a logic of world decomposition, unfolding over secular and...