Allegory dominates expression when things are sundered from meaning

Evidence

Benjamin’s sensitivity is for those moments in which human beings find themselves given over into the power of things; and the familiar content of baroque tragedy (that melancholy which we recognize from Hamlet, those vices of melancholy—lust, treason, sadism—so predominant in the lesser Elizabethans, in Webster for instance) veers about slowly into a question of form, into the problem of objects, which is to say of allegory itself. For allegory is precisely the dominant mode of expression of a world in which things have been for whatever reason utterly sundered from meanings, from spirit, from genuine human existence. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 157

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Benjamin’s core definition of allegory as the formal mode of a world where objects and meaning are sundered.
• XREF: Connects to Lukács’s theory of reification via Benjamin — both see a world of thinghood where objects resist human meaning. — connects to: Contested signs retain force while settled ones decay into allegory; Symbolism arises only after objects have lost immediate meaning — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 349

Broader Connections

• Contested signs retain force while settled ones decay into allegory #complicates (0.75)
• Symbolism arises only after objects have lost immediate meaning #complicates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 349