Modern occultism reanimates objects the way commodity fetishism does

Evidence

The latter was the precipitate of the state of knowledge of successive epochs, each of which showed its consciousness to be some degrees more free of blind subservience to nature than had the previous. The former, deranged and bemused, throws away the hard-won knowledge of itself, in the midst of a society which, by the all-encompassing exchange-relationship, eliminates precisely the elemental power the occultists claim to command. … As a rationally exploited reaction to rationalized society, however, in the booths and consulting rooms of seers of all gradations, reborn animism denies the alienation of which it is itself proof and product, and concocts surrogates for non-existent experience. The occultist draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish-character of commodities: menacingly objectified labour assails him on all sides from demonically grimacing objects. What has been forgotten in a world congealed into products, the fact that it has been produced by men, is split off and misremembered as a being-in-itself added to that of the objects and equivalent to them. Because objects have frozen in the cold light of reason, lost their illusory animation, the social quality that now animates them is given an independent existence both natural and supernatural, a thing among things. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 259

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno’s account of how reborn animism under late capitalism is the occultist draw of the fetish-character of commodities — the social quality of objects given independent supernatural existence.
• XREF: Ties directly to the commodity fetishism chapter of Capital and to Lukács’s reification essays, the core network of Frankfurt-school critical theory. — connects to: The image of uninhibited vitality itself recycles commodity fetishism; Kantian disinterested aesthetic pleasure descends from magical fetish worship — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 250; Commodity fetishism presents social labour relations as properties of things — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 410 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Commodity fetishism presents social labour relations as properties of things #expands (0.92) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 410