Cultural reification produces consumer subalternity toward cultural producers

Evidence

The feature of reification I want to insist on in this realm of cultural products is what generates a radical separation between consumers and producers. Specialization is too weak and non-dialectical a term for that, but it plays its part in developing and perpetuating a deep conviction within the consumer that the production of the product in question — attributable no doubt to other human beings in the generic sense — is nonetheless beyond anything you can imagine; it is not something the consumer or user has any social sympathy for whatsoever. In that respect, it is a little like the feeling nonintellectuals and lower-class people have always had about intellectuals and what they do: you see them doing it, and it doesn’t look very complicated, but even with the best will in the world you don’t quite get it, you don’t see why people would want to do things like that, let alone trust yourself to form an idea of what it is they actually do. True Gramscian subalternity that: the deep sense of inferiority in the face of the cultural other, the implicit acknowledgment of their innate superiority, to which punctual rage or anti-intellectualism or working-class contempt and machismo is itself only a secondary reaction, a reaction to my inferiority first and foremost, before being transferred onto the intellectual. I want to suggest that something like this subalternity — Gunther Anders years ago in a somewhat different connection called it Promethean shame, a Promethean inferiority complex in front of the machine — is what we now feel for culture more generally. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 688

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines reification applied to cultural products as a radical consumer-producer separation generating a ‘Promethean shame’ before culture.
• XREF: Promethean shame and the cognitive-map project connect to the reader’s goal of placing their own position in the cultural logic. — connects to: Product differentiation in mass culture functions as consumer classification, not real variety. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 95
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that consumer awe before cultural products mirrors working-class subalternity before intellectuals — with anti-intellectualism reframed as a secondary reaction to felt inferiority — is a dense, reframing move worth sitting with.