The image of uninhibited vitality itself recycles commodity fetishism

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 410 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Civilization’s bondage breeds longing that becomes worship of a transfigured nature; The self’s seeming uniqueness is a mass-produced commodity falsely posed as natural — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 117; Debord theorized spectacle as commodity fetishism’s absolute fulfillment — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 549 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern occultism reanimates objects the way commodity fetishism does #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 259
• Commodity fetishism presents social labour relations as properties of things #expands (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 410