Cultural works can be analyzed as deliberate reification rather than disguised class relations

Evidence

But what of the reality, rather than the illusion, of fetishization? What happens when we consider the work not so much as a relatively disguised relationship but rather as a form of density in its own right, as something produced, as consciousness quite deliberately reified? When we recall, in short, the two possible codes or languages of a Marxist analysis, we may begin to suspect that everything we have hitherto described in terms of class may also be developed in a quite different way, and indeed with quite different, although no less revealing, results. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 749

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘two codes or languages of Marxist analysis’ — class-transparent vs. reified-formalist — tracks the Adorno/Benjamin debate Jameson is working through, and anticipates his later ‘political unconscious’ dialectics. — connects to: Social historians reconceived class as crafted relations rather than a structural given; Disciplinary boundaries reflect reification, not the nature of their objects — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 11; Damien Hirst’s art functions as pure financial value rather than cultural meaning — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1594
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: what exactly are the two codes, and does Jameson privilege the reified-form code for what it reveals that the class code cannot?

Broader Connections

• Social historians reconceived class as crafted relations rather than a structural given #corroborates (0.75)
• Disciplinary boundaries reflect reification, not the nature of their objects #corroborates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 11