Reified products block imaginative participation in their production yet remain consumable.

Evidence

At any rate, it is thus, as a fact, that I would like to talk about reification: in this sense of the way in which a product somehow shuts us out even from a sympathetic participation, by imagination, in its production. It comes before us, no questions asked, as something we could not begin to imagine doing for ourselves. But this in no way means that we cannot consume the product in question, “derive enjoyment” from it, become addicted to it, etc. Indeed, consumption in the social sense is very specifically the word for what we in fact do to reified products of this kind, that occupy our minds and float above that deeper nihilistic void left in our being by the inability to control our own destiny. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 690

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson’s concrete definition of reification here is the version to use in the reader’s note-taking and explanation.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s cognitive map task — reification as the gap that cognitive mapping is meant to bridge.