Symbolism arises when modernity severs objects from their human labor origins

Evidence

It is perhaps easiest to begin with the negative part of the definition, with that hostile diagnosis of symbolism which will be a constant throughout Lukács’ career: for him, symbolism is not just one literary technique among others, but represents a qualitatively different mode of apprehending the world from the realistic one. Symbolism, we may say, is always a second best, always a kind of admission of defeat on the part of the novelist; for by having recourse to it the writer implies that some original, objective meaning in objects is henceforth inaccessible to him, that he must invent a new and fictive one to conceal this basic absence, this basic silence of things. The symbolic mode is of course not so much the result of the writer’s personal aesthetic as of the historical situation itself: in their origin, all objects have a human meaning. Even nature itself is humanized, by the manner in which man makes his home within it, in which he converts it to his own use (thus the rocky and barren landscape of Greece is turned inside out like a glove, domesticated, by an economy that adapts to it with seafaring and commerce, artisanal production). This original meaningfulness of objects becomes visible only when their link with human labor and production is unconcealed. But in modern industrial civilization this link is hard to find: objects appear to lead an independent life of their own, and it is precisely this illusion which is the source of the symbolic. In Zola, the mine comes to be felt as a beast, night-marishly inhabiting the landscape, devouring human flesh. In Joyce, the newspaper office comes to seem the cave of the winds: whatever realistic, historical meaning it also possesses has come to seem too drab and prosaic for the work of art. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 396

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates Jameson’s later, more famous analysis in “The Political Unconscious” and links to Lukács’s Theory of the Novel; also echoes Marx’s commodity fetishism (objects appearing to lead independent lives). — connects to: Modern occultism reanimates objects the way commodity fetishism does — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 259; Symbols present self-repetitive nature as eternal and endlessly renewed; Capitalist exchange abstracts objects from the real labor that produced them — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 95 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that symbolism is itself a historical product — an admission of defeat born of industrial civilization, not a personal aesthetic — is the core of Lukács’s dialectical reading; dense and worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Modern occultism reanimates objects the way commodity fetishism does #corroborates (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 259
• Capitalist exchange abstracts objects from the real labor that produced them #corroborates (0.80) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 95
• Symbols present self-repetitive nature as eternal and endlessly renewed #expands (0.75)