Commodity production narrowed nineteenth-century life into reified phantasmagorias, making the era mythical

Evidence

From this combination, he drew out an image of the protohistory of the nineteenth century which indicated that the new creations and ways of life, above all those determined by the production of commodities, had not been crowned by the creation of a new form of society and given free development, but had only achieved a development that had been narrowed and misled by reified cultural concepts and was accompanied by phantasmagorias. … The fact that the daring creations of the nineteenth century presented themselves as phantasmagorias made the epoch a mythical one. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 224

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Benjamin’s key term ‘protohistory’ (Urgeschichte) as the mythical, phantasmagoric underside of the nineteenth century, not merely chronological pre-history.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s broader account of reification and the culture industry; also to Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the concept of the dialectical image.